I’m excited about wearables. I’m pretty much a fitness and a self-improvement nut, I’m a data fanatic, and I see a huge future in the Quantified Self and the Internet of Things. Unfortunately, however, I can sum up my review of the original Samsung Galaxy Gear in six words.

I wouldn’t wear it all day.

Thus, this marvelous piece of equipment is relegated to niche. To be honest, my six-year-old got more use out of it than I did, as the most expensive spy toy he’s ever been allowed to hold.

And when I read articles like this one claiming that wearables are still just a trend, I begrudgingly start to nod my head. Then I remember that smart watches and wearables aren’t the same thing. A smart watch is a wearable, but it’s just one kind of wearable.

When I consider smart watches as a sector on their own, the technology available today reminds me of Windows smart phones circa 2006. There was so much you could do with them, but it was such a pain in the ass to do it, you never did it.

“Hold on a sec, let me find my stylus.”

A Phone Is Not a Laptop

What Windows did wrong with smartphones, and kept doing wrong up until Windows Mobile 7 for that matter, was try to recreate the personal computing experience in your hand. This didn’t work, and it was actually Apple’s limitation-first philosophy on iOS (and, I’ll say it, great design) that created a new set of use cases.

Apple realized you weren’t going to do spreadsheets on your phone, and they quickly rolled out a plethora of apps designed for touch, swipe, location, and communication, the holy quarternity of mobile usage.

Android capitalized and mass-marketed the use cases, creating a half-open-source ubiquity which, in my opinion, brought about the dominance of mobile-first development. Remember the days when you could develop for iOS and wait to release on Android, if at all?

Playing the mobile metaphor all the way to the end, there’s obviously an iPhone-of-watches out there on the horizon. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be the iWatch. It could be. But it doesn’t have to be.

It probably isn’t the Gear 2 either. Tizen over Android is probably a step in the right direction, but from what I’ve seen, the use cases are the same as the original Gear — make calls, read texts, count steps, take photos.

All of which can be done on the Samsung phone that, and this holds true with the Gear 2, you have to have nearby for the Gear to do a lot of what it can do.

Pain in the ass? Not really, but it doesn’t move the smart watch category past accessory.

A Watch Is Not a Phone

The problem with smart watches is they’re trying to be little tiny smart phones when they’re not. The technology isn’t there to support a form factor or battery life that makes the phone replaceable.

I don’t want to talk into my wrist. The screen size is ill-equipped for the vast majority of smart phone functions, including typing. The camera — yeah, it’s 2MP — but the photos and videos look like dumb phone photos and videos circa 2006.

And the circle is complete.

So except for a slim cross-section of usage, sending calls to voicemail, LOLs, and happenstance photos to document something like, I don’t know, shipping something expensive, I’m just gonna go ahead and take the extra three seconds to reach into my pocket for my phone.

The beauty of something like a Jawbone UP is, much like the iOS example above, in its limitations. It doesn’t do shit. It can count my steps, roughly monitor my sleep, and wake me up. End of story.

But you know what? I forget it’s there. I don’t carry my phone all day, maybe 90% of the day, but that other 10%, the UP is counting the steps the phone can’t. Same thing with sleep, although frankly, I don’t use the UP for that, mostly because I don’t like sleeping with the equipment on.

The reason we all took off our watches in the 2010s wasn’t all due to the fact that we had smart phones in our pockets telling us the time — we had that years earlier with dumb phones. We took our watches off because, more often than not, something within a neck-crane was telling us the time when we needed to know the time.

Yeah, people still wear watches for the look. But remember calculator watches? Those were pretty.

Keeping It Simple

The UP has one button, and here’s where simplicity calls for smarts. Open the functionality of that single button to be smart enough to be aware of other devices in range, like your car, the television, a friend’s wearable, and you’re onto a whole new set of use cases. Add one and two finger touch, maybe swipe or tap, against the device itself, not some ridiculously small screen, and now you’re communicating.

But that last one for all its potential human error and battery drainage, is only necessary if communication is a viable part of wearable usage.

I mean, it’s a safe bet right now that the camera, whether it’s a Dick Tracy wrist mount or a glasshole “is-anybody-in-this-stall?” legal nightmare, is probably not. If I want to communicate, I’ll pull out my phone. I can’t imagine the use case where I wouldn’t.

Wearables are still awesome. They are still the future, despite the naysayers. But until we settle on a common set of use-case functionality and the right lexicon of input and feedback, we’ll see rev after rev of smart watch doing all sorts of tricky things, but still, disappointingly, never taking off.