Friday I saw one of those “smart watches” out in the wild. You know… basically a “smart phone” squished down into a square maybe an inch and a half on a side and put on a wrist strap. I may well have encountered someone wearing one before, but this was the first time I noticed – because he was using it as a phone.
For the first half second or so, my thought was “What is that guy doing?” The second half second was “oh, that’s a smart watch, and he’s using it as a phone,” followed by “Heh, kinda cool… Dick Tracy” followed by an extended period of “Huh. It looks like it sucks.”
As a phone, it appeared to be very unergonomic. We were in a convenience store, we were both getting Bloomberg-unapproved large sodas… and he was having a hell of a time. His left hand, the one with the watch, was useless for carrying anything, since he had to hold his wrist up to his head. And apparently its speaker and/or microphone weren’t very good… he was constantly shifting the phone from his ear to his mouth and back. Just didn’t seem terribly well thought out.
Granted, a regular phone will also destroy one hands ability to carry stuff (assuming you don’t have a headset for it)… but you probably won’t be doing a whole lot of shifting from mouth to ear.