As a user of the Pebble Steel smart-watch I have incorporated the use of wrist vibration and quick glance notifications into my professional and personal life. I didn't know just how practical it would be until I actually got it. 5-7 days of battery is not ideal but charging once a week is pretty good compared to once a day.
Many people have to remember to charge their smartphones daily anyway. For most of them, charging one more device at the same time should be a non-issue.
In practice, keeping track of devices with vastly different battery charging schedules is actually a much bigger mental challenge.
That's one thing that I don't understand; If colour e-ink is available, why did Apple go for a power-hungry LCD display? Because it's higher res? So I can see my photos on a 42mm screen?
The Apple Watch uses an OLED screen which uses less power than LCD displays but provides (arguably) even better picture quality.
I am very familiar with e-ink displays and have been following the related developments closely. However, even a colored e-ink display would be a complete deal breaker on a 10.000 USD smart-watch designed to compete with existing high-end watches.
Best case of a 'Solution in search of a Problem' thus far.
For the time being, the Apple Watch is primarily a replacement for Apple´s (small) iPod series of products.
Consumers have strongly preferred bigger smartphones for a while now and Apple finally released bigger iPhones last autumn but this also meant that the form factors had now become a little too big for a number of common uses. If you are an active person, an Apple Watch is a much better device for listening to music (and monitoring your health) than a comparably bulky iPhone would be.
With regard to the future, surveys have shown very strong consumer demand for devices that monitor people´s health. A smart/watch is a natural fit for these type of tasks. Reports indicate that the current generation of sensors used by Apple is just not good enough yet to provide reliable health statistics but this may very well change in the future.
