Concept design for an iWatch (Photo credit: Brett Jordan)  Mobile technology is breathing new life into devices we once thought were rather boring — like watches. A year ago, who needed to buy a watch when you could pull a smartphone out of your pocket and read the time on a brightly-lit screen? Yet that sentiment may change soon enough.  Apple is betting consumers will have found the pulling-out-of-the-pocket manoeuvre too tiring once they realize they can simply glance at their wrist to check the time, along with their email, social media notifications and heart rate. Apple has around 100 people working on a watch-like device that could come this year, according to Bloomberg News and The Verge, and it’s rumored to be called the iWatch, running parallel to that other big wearable device product in the works in Silicon Valley: Google Glass.  Where might that leave smartphones?  In the U.S., Europe and parts of Asia which are deeply saturated with smart, mobile devices, consumers may eventually decide the smartest machines they own are no longer pocketable slabs for wireless communication, but the watch or glasses they can wear and barely have to handle.  One possible result: smartphones are not longer ‘smart,’ but relegated back to their old role of providing basic wireless communication and nothing more.  In fact, if the designers of the iWatch and Google Glass can figure out a seamless way to work with earphones and mics, and these devices have their own SIM, who knows if smartphones as we know them will even be needed?  For one thing, consumers would still want a decent display for viewing content. In this case, smartphones could be replaced with cheaper, “dumb screens” that can connect, via WiFi or bluetooth, with the more powerful processing power in the wearable device.  Another option is that the smartphone as a slab still exists, and remains the wireless “hub” that contains a SIM card and processing power, but it also becomes a device that we don’t interact with as much anymore and therefore becomes cheaper. (The case for a cheaper iPhone in developed markets becomes stronger here too). You can leave the phone in your bag, and not worry about hearing it ring because you have your iWatch on.  “It replaces the compulsive need to turn on your phone and check who’s been calling you,” says Vinita Jakhanwal, director of mobile and emerging displays with IHS iSupply.  A current example of this idea comes from Pebble, an e-paper watch that has raised $10 million in funding on Kickstarter and is perhaps the most well-known of the forthcoming wave of smart watches. It uses Bluetooth to harness the functionality and processing power of a smartphone to display its notifications.  Jakhanwal says a wearable device like Google Glass probably wouldn’t need a second screen, since the device can project a fairly large display. But she also questions how viable a product Glass is, knowing that 3D televisions has struggled to catch on. “Consumers don’t take to wearing something on their eyes very easily,” she says.  So if wearable watches rise, could we also see ‘dumb displays’ replacing smartphones? “What’s not very clear right now is what your user interface is going to be with these new types of devices. Google Glass works with voice… but a lot of work still needs to be done to make those kinds of interfaces easy and accurate to use,” says Jakhanwal. “It could also be gesture as a user interface rather than touch.”  Some concept devices have even used the blinking eye as an interface method. “How you superimpose your basic iOS and device with user interaction will be critical to making these devices successful,” she says.  One thing to note: if wearable devices do send rectangular smartphones the the way of the PC tower, it won’t be for years yet. The mobile market is too huge for that. Roughly 1.2 billion mobile phones were sold in 2012 alone, and around 800 million of them were smartphones, Jakhanwal notes. “The smartphone market will not go away.”
The rectangular slabs in our pockets could eventually be relegated to 'dumb screens,' if we get all our notifications and connectivity from wearable devices.