it won't last 18 hours
You can bet your life if it did, they'd be crowing from the rooftops about it.
Oh, these things will sell, of that there is no doubt, but they'll sell to the minority demographic of nerds and Applefans.
They're just not fit for purpose, any of them; a watch has to be a fire and forget thing. Between solar power and kinetic systems, watches run effectively forever. Any watch has to run for at least 24 hours If it's a fitness watch, it has to be able to go into the shower and into the pool. If it's an outdoorsy watch, it needs to work off the grid, all the time, and be robust.
And at £350 and upwards (yeah, the $->£ conversion is a bitch), it needs to have a lifespan of more than two years, and I'm not at all convinced a device made to mobile phone standards will manage that. I've had this Omega (orange PO, fact fans!) for six years now and it's just as good now as it was when I bought it. It'll be just as good in ten or twenty years, too.
It's not just that the current crop of smart watches don't tick all of these boxes, they don't tick any of them.
They fit one use case - the urban hipster who doesn't work a particularly long day or has easy access to a charger, who has his phone with him all the time, and who doesn't want to do anything more than count his steps and get notifications of his email/tweets/whatever.
And yes, it's going to be a "him".
Bottom line: your wrist is a really dandy and convenient place to put a clock. It's a retarded place to put your phone.
Oh, these things will sell, of that there is no doubt, but they'll sell to the minority demographic of nerds and Applefans.
They're just not fit for purpose, any of them; a watch has to be a fire and forget thing. Between solar power and kinetic systems, watches run effectively forever. Any watch has to run for at least 24 hours If it's a fitness watch, it has to be able to go into the shower and into the pool. If it's an outdoorsy watch, it needs to work off the grid, all the time, and be robust.
And at £350 and upwards (yeah, the $->£ conversion is a bitch), it needs to have a lifespan of more than two years, and I'm not at all convinced a device made to mobile phone standards will manage that. I've had this Omega (orange PO, fact fans!) for six years now and it's just as good now as it was when I bought it. It'll be just as good in ten or twenty years, too.
It's not just that the current crop of smart watches don't tick all of these boxes, they don't tick any of them.
They fit one use case - the urban hipster who doesn't work a particularly long day or has easy access to a charger, who has his phone with him all the time, and who doesn't want to do anything more than count his steps and get notifications of his email/tweets/whatever.
And yes, it's going to be a "him".
Bottom line: your wrist is a really dandy and convenient place to put a clock. It's a retarded place to put your phone.