Apple Watch – What can you do with it?

I referee soccer. This means that some number of times a year, I regularly get paid for an activity where a wristwatch is my only piece of tech and I rely on it while breathing heavily and making spectators, team officials and players express their unhappiness. I have half a dozen wristwatches in my referee bag. When I run center, I accumulate wristwatch-wearing-hours two at a time because I have to get things right. No amount of software sophistication can overcome the ergonomics of wristwatches.

The wristwatch form factor has poor ergonomics for an interactive device because it always requires two hands. Placing a small machine on the wrist puts it out of harms way by placing it behind our primary method for interacting with the physical world. Wristwatches work ergonomically because they require limited manipulation and are primarily displays.

To the degree wristwatches offer interaction, quick interactions are done by feel. Timex's Ironman series performs its intended function well because the lap button is easy to locate without looking. However, basic wristwatch ergonomics mean that hitting that button is two handed and slows down a runner. Even worse, bringing an arm across the chest briefly inhibits full expansion of the chest and thus lung capacity. Only because the information the watch provides is so valuable is such a biomechanical cost a viable engineering tradeoff.

Running a wristwatch off a phone turns two-handed one-device operations into potential two-or-three-handed two-device operations. Sure, the obvious solution is a voice interface...but when everything runs on the phone, then a wristwatch is just a bluetooth microphone with a small display...with wrist mounted microphone versus headset mounted.

On the other hand, The wrist is a well protected place for mounting sensitive equipment on the body and the wristwatch is a reasonable form factor for sensors, yet in the long run serious sensor platforms want to be open as do the platforms for analysis of sensor data. Proprietary interfaces are not likely to be the direct road to the quantified self.

- Ads are intrusive. No one likes ads and they don't pay very well anyway (Google for instance has had their ad money per ad go down year over year). I feel like their days may be numbered.

- Paid apps don't give a user a chance to try an application and if the price is too high, even if the app is truly worth it, it may never get a shot with the user's. Granted Apple still makes a ton of money with these but the app developers have spoken: they make more money with the freemium model.

- Free apps with in app purchases make the most money for developers. Unfortunately the whole thing is kind of an ethics conundrum; is it okay to give someone something but they can't use parts of it until they pay you for it? What about schemes that are actually hinder the product just to try and make the user give the app more cash (e.g. buying "energy" or whatever games will use to make things go slow). This model seems to be getting a lot of backlash lately.

- The other important one you missed is subscriptions; they are probably more fair but who wants to pay something every month when they probably already have 20 other bills to pay each month? Especially when you look at services who tie little things to paying for a subscription like adding the ability to use subtasks in an application requires a subscription.

It's hard to figure out how to sort all of this mess out. Personally I like the option of being able to try an application and if I like it pay for it outright. No ads or in app purchases or subscriptions. Granted subscriptions are sometimes necessary too especially if you're consuming external resources on a constant basis (e.g. "cloud backup" or sync, etc).

I'd love to entertain alternatives even if they sound worse at first just to go through the exercise of exploring them and trying to find better ways to make this all work.

But I can't say I'm not entirely surprised. Apple doesn't like people customizing the look of their products much. Look at the iPhone (which I own) it's still a grid of icons; no live information at all like every single other platform out there unless you want to dig into a draw and slide over to today.

How many people have metallic pigment tattoos on their wrists?