After 100 years, time's up for wrist watch
Apple Watch, which is being described as
techno-porn, seems set to change the way we look at the human wrist
The timing of the Apple Watch is ironic. It
might be a coincidence, but fact that it's being released in 2015 means that
the era of the wristwatch, as we know it, is probably ending after almost
exactly 100 years.
While the watch was invented in the 16th
century, wrist-watches were considered to be effeminate, and so, until the early
20th century, men chose to wear pocket watches. Wrist-watches were for women,
designed more as novel pieces of jewellery than for time-keeping. And while
various famous watch companies claim to have been the first to invent the
wrist-watch, the fact is that the idea was actually evolved by its users,
rather than a manufacturer.
In the late 19th century, with advances in
military tactics and the need for stealth in co-ordinating complex military
operations, the watch became increasingly important. But the problem was that
fiddling with a pocket watch on the battlefield was a cumbersome and
potentially dangerous matter. As a result, one British cavalry officer thought
up the idea of having a leather wrist strap made for himself, onto which he
could attach his pocket watch for convenience.The idea quickly caught on, and
the leather watch strap became a popular accessory among army officers, as well
as hunters and sportsmen. But, interestingly, they used the watch strap only
while they were in action; for normal use the pocket watch went back into the
special pockets stitched into their clothing.
It was World War I that marked the real
emergence of the wrist-watch: in 1914 it was a rarity; by 1918, when the
soldiers came back from the war, almost all of them were wearing wrist-watches.
And since then, for a hundred years, the human wrist has become a valuable
piece of `real estate' for the watch industry , which has vied to occupy it with
watches that have increasingly become statements of fashion, and of status. As
a famous Rolex watch advertisement once succinctly put it, “The fact that it
tells the time is incidental.“
But now the Apple Watch seems set to change the
way we look at the human wrist. It keeps time with an accuracy within
five-hundredths of a second. It also helps you do cool things like keep track
of your health, pay your bills with a hand-swipe, and send your heartbeats to
your lover. But beyond that it can do a zillion things which even Apple doesn't
know yet.
And that's because those functionalities are
being developed, not by Apple, but by armies of third party app developers -the
kind of apps that made the iPad and iPhone so indispensable to their users.That
is one of the explanations for the curious fact that Apple gave a six-month gap
between launching the watch and actually shipping it out: it was mainly to give
all those app developers a time-window to create all the necessary apps.A
diabolically clever strategy.
The Apple Watch is just the latest in a long
line of smartwatches, which can arguably trace their history back to the early
1980s, when Seiko introduced the Pulsar, the first watch to offer a
pre-programmable memory bank. But the turning point was probably the launch of
the Pebble in 2013.Today there is a line-up of smartwatch players, from Samsung
and Sony to Google and Nike, the main difference being their relative positions
on the wearable technology scale: while the others tend to be on the `technology'
end of the scale, the Apple Watch is clearly at the `wearable' extreme. At the
launch, Apple CEO, Tim Cook, described it as `cool', `brilliant' and `great',
but the best description of its looks is probably `techno-porn'.
So what happens to conventional watches now?
Some watch companies realize that it's an existential crisis and they need to
respond urgently , or else. Titan, for example, one of the world's five largest
watch manufacturers today, has set up a technology innovation cell named
Innovedge to work with its design studio on developing smartwatches. But maybe,
there's an opportunity for it to go beyond, and create a killer partnership
with sister company , TCS. (Such a partnership might even result in the first
global technology product out of India). Meanwhile, the Swiss watch industry is
putting on a brave face. As one Swiss watch maker put it, smartwatches are
merely technology toys that become obsolete every couple of years, while a
classic watch is a piece of eternity .
Who knows, maybe people will adopt smartwatches
for all the gee-whiz functionalities they offer, but still wear a beautifully
crafted conventional watch to make a personal statement. After all, we have not
just one wrist, but two.
|
Anvar Alikhan
|
TOI8MAR15
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