A smartwatch is a portable device that's designed to be worn on a wrist. Like smartphones, they use touchscreens, offer apps, and often record your heart rate and other vital signs.
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The Apple Watch and Wear (formerly Android Wear) models prompted more consumers to appreciate the usefulness of wearing a mini computer on their wrists. In addition, specialty smartwatches for outdoor activities often supplement other, bulkier devices in an adventurer's tool kit.
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A Short History of the Smartwatch
While digital watches have been around for decades—some with abilities like calculators and unit converters—only in the 2010s did tech companies begin releasing watches with smartphone-like abilities.
Apple, Samsung, Sony, and other major players offer smartwatches on the consumer market, but a small startup actually deserves credit for popularizing the modern-day smartwatch. When Pebble announced its first smartwatch in 2013, it raised a record amount of funding on Kickstarter and went on to sell more than one million units.
The Pebble smartwatch was discontinued when the company shut down in 2016, but still has a number of fans and enthusiasts who continue to use and develop for it.
At the same time, advances in silicon miniaturization opened the door to other kinds of dedicated-purpose smartwatches. Companies like Garmin, for example, support smartwatches like the Fenix, which are more rugged and optimized with sensors and trackers to support back-country expeditions. Likewise, companies like Suunto released smartwatches optimized for scuba diving that withstand extended time at significant depths.
What Do Smartwatches Do?
Most smartwatches—whether they're intended for daily use (as with the Apple Watch) or for specific purposes (as with the Garmin Fenix)—offer a suite of standard features:
Types of Smartwatches
Broadly speaking, smartwatches occupy two niches in the wearables market. First, a general-purpose smartwatch—like the Apple Watch and most Google-powered Wear devices—blend form and function. They're designed to replace mechanical wristwatches and are heavily smartphone-dependent. Think of them as a support device for your phone that you happen to keep on your wrist.
You also see vendor-specific classes of general-purpose smartwatches in the consumer market:
The other niche includes specialty devices intended for specific-use cases. These devices often offer a more robust version of a fitness tracker, insofar as they bleed between a phone-dependent smartwatch and a stand-alone fitness tracker like a Fitbit.
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Examples of these specialized devices include:
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Smartwatch Market Growth
Smartwatches settled into a steep growth curve in the late 2010s in terms of global market adoption. Data from Statista shows that sales rose from five million units worldwide in 2014 to an estimated 173 million in 2022. Apple's market share rose from 13- to 30-percent from the second fiscal quarter of 2017 to the same period in 2021. With Samsung in the second-place spot with a 10-percent market share.
During the same period, specialty vendors like Garmin saw a 4.1-percent increase in year-over-year growth, while fitness-tracker-only vendors like Fitbit saw a nearly 22-percent market plunge.
Statista predicts that over 253 million smartwatches will ship worldwide by 2025.
FAQ
What are hybrid smartwatches?
Hybrid smartwatches are watches with the traditional looks and feels of a watch, but they also come with smartwatch functionality.
What is the difference between a smartwatch and a Fitbit?
Fitbits are fitness trackers, which do have functionality similar to smartwatches, but they focus on fitness-oriented features and don't often come with the advanced features of smartwatches.
We are pleased to introduce one of our new content series, the Historical Overview. From the smartwatch to the personal computer and beyond, Historical Overview aims to provide an in-depth perspective on the timeline of modern devices that have penetrated our daily lives and to spark discussions around both modern and older technology.
Pebble, Apple, Huawei, and a host of other companies have spent millions of dollars in smartwatch technology in recent years. Today, the smartwatch is perhaps the most recognisable piece of the wearables industry, a gadget that has become almost synonymous with wearable technology, and an equally controversial and promising piece with a lot of room for growth. However, the concept of the smartwatch is not new at all. In fact, smartwatch history goes back several decades into the past when computerised technology was still in its early stages.
In 1972, the Hamilton Watch Company and Electro/Data Inc. developed the first digital watch, an LED prototype named Pulsar. Wrapped in 18-carat gold, the Pulsar was sold for $2,100. Adjusted for inflation, that number comes closer to $12,300 in 2016. Though users had to press a button in order to see the time, the Pulsar virtually revolutionised the field of watches and paved the way for its smart successors. One could even argue that this was a pivotal point in smartwatch history.
Soon after, various Japanese companies started experimenting on ways to introduce more content into watches by allowing users to input or view additional forms of data. Seiko was one of the very first companies to pioneer in the field. In 1983, they released the famous T001 which can also be seen in James Bond’s Octopussy. The watch was linked to a portable TV receiver while the 1 ¼ screen was divided into two separate areas. The top one was reserved for standard watch features like showing the time and setting alarms but the bottom part was used for video output, albeit in abysmal quality.
During that same time, Seiko released the Data 2000. The watch received its title from the fact that it could store 2,000 characters which could be inputted from an external keyboard dock. A mere year later, the similar RC-1000 was released with a substantial new feature; the ability to connect to most computers of the time. By connecting the RC-1000 to a Commodore 64 or an Apple II, users could interact with their watches and share information. Perhaps the closest device to modern smartwatches, however, was the RC-20 Wrist Computer. This little watch was equipped with an 8-bit Z-80 microprocessor, 2KB of RAM, and 8KB of storage. It included applications for scheduling, memos, world times, and a calculator.
In 1994, the Timex Datalink became the very first watch capable of downloading data from a computer wirelessly. Co-developed with Microsoft, its use of technology was ingenious. By illuminating a computer screen with a changing blinking display, it could encode information to transfer which was detected by a sensor embedded inside the watch. The Datalink was a hallmark of scientific ingenuity and was even employed by NASA in various space travel missions. This was also Microsoft’s first foray into the market though certainly not the last.
Pioneer inventor Steve Mann designed and developed the very first Linux smartwatch in 1998. After presenting the watch, he was rightfully hailed as the “father of wearable computing”, a very deserving title considering his work in the field. Of course, Mann has made a host of other significant contributions to modern technology, including being the first to develop modern HDR imaging methods.
Samsung was one of the very first companies to introduce smartwatches to the Android market and for good reason. The company was actually the first to develop a watch capable of telecommunications back in 1999. The SPH-WP10 featured a monochrome LCD screen and was capable of 90 minutes of talk time with its integrated speaker and microphone. The company gave up its smartwatch efforts soon after but once it recognised the potential of the industry a few years ago, it quickly invested into the field again.
In 2000, IBM revealed a prototype Linux smartwatch called the WatchPad. Though the original version was somewhat lacking, the company quickly upgraded it. In 2001, the WatchPad 1.5 had an accelerometer, a fingerprint sensor, and a vibrating mechanism. Moreover, it ran Linux 2.2, had a 320 x 240 QVGA touch-sensitive display, Bluetooth, 8MB of RAM, and 16MB of flash storage. It was a vision of things to come, albeit mobile technology was not nearly good enough for this gadget to be viable back then.
Though younger readers may not remember these devices, PDAs were incredibly common well into the early 2000s. As such, Fossil decided to release a unique device called the Wrist PDA. Despite its name, it was actually a revolutionary device that may well be considered an early predecessor of smartwatches. It was capable of exchanging data with PCs and it featured a virtual keyboard, a touch screen, an infrared port, and a tiny stylus so that users could interact with it more efficiently. Reviewers at the time hailed it for its innovations, including the ability to use a host of different applications in Palm OS.
In 2004, Microsoft attempted another foray into the market with the Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) smartwatch. The entire project was really a precursor to wearables and IoT in an attempt to personalize technology. Unfortunately, Microsoft made several bad decisions during this endeavor, including closing down the network to its own ecosystem so its ultimate demise was not entirely unexpected.
Since then, a number of companies have tried their hands in smart watches though most attempts were either too niche or too impractical to appeal to a mainstream audience. In 2012, Pebble virtually changed both the Kickstarter world and the wearable market by marking a new point in smartwatch history as its $10 million campaign showed all the major tech companies that there was a real demand for such devices. Omate in 2013 was the first company to design a truly independent smartwatch. The so called TrueSmart could make calls, use maps, and take advantage of Android apps completely independently. Though their Kickstarter campaign was loaded with mistakes and failed promises, it marked the beginning of a new era.
Did you enjoy the brief lesson in smartwatch history? Do you own any wearable devices? What’s your opinion on them? Feel free to join us in a discussion in the comments below!
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