Jun 27, 2014

Thoughts on Wearables Battery

Of late there has been a lot of talk about wearables. Small devices which are powerful enough to communicate to others. Its part of the bigger "Internet of Everything". Nike came out with their run measuring devices and Pebble came out with their smartwatch, followed by Samsung with their Galaxy Gear.

The focus off late seems to have shifted to watches with the hype building up for an imminent launch of a watch from Apple and other companies making a preemptive strike by launching their watches first.

Google has gone all out by developing SDKs for wearables and have 2 watches out for preorder (from LG and Samsung) and another to follow soon ( from Motorola). Impressive tech which syncs seamlessly with your phone ( if you have android 4.3+ running on it).

However, no one is mentioning the Elephant in the Room - the battery life.

Pebble has just 7 days of batter life. That is quite bad for a watch. Usual watches last a year or more on a single cell, and if you have a solar watch or the kinetic watches - they last even longer.
The Google watches last at max a day. A Day! Just that much ? I am fed up of charging my phone every day - though it is still bearable as I can easily put that on the table while charging. However, with a watch - do you think you will be able to keep it on your wrist while charging ?

Another common problem with a 1 day approach is that most people have 2 or more watches. Depending on the mood ( or clothes ) people like to use the watch as an accessory. But with this kind of battery life either you will need to keep using the watch everyday and give up your other watches, or have the foresight to charge it before you plan to wear it.

I think a communicating watch - with other benefits like GPS tracking/health monitoring is an amazing technological advancement, but without a good battery life this thing is just for geeky people to showoff that they are using it.

What do you think - would you like to have a watch which you have to keep charging every day ?

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