Smart watches don't date an Apple ecosystem

A Samsung Galaxy Gear smart watch.

I'll soon be in the market for a new smartphone so I've been giving some thought to which way I will go. Its not a serious dilemma for me, I admit, as our house is already full to the gunnels with 'idevices' of various sorts. Most of these would work quite happily with Android-based phones should the need arise, but only a killer feature would tempt me away from the Apple world at this stage of my technological life.

This is of course exactly what Apple wants: once in Apple World, you stay there. The soon-to-be-upon-us new version of iOS from Apple (iOS 8) offers a number of useful features (especially for households like ours with kids). Family-orientated shared accounts give everyone access to music, movies, TV shows, books and apps with one account. The new OS X Yosemite has nice tricks too, like hand-off between devices to make swapping between them seamless. But these things are available to you only if you stay in Apple's ecosystem.

Google is no different. Its recent purchase of Nest home technology company and the launch of Google Wear for wearable tech are efforts to tie its ecosystem more closely together. More telling are the restrictions Google has started placing on its Android partners. Android has been a massive success, now dominating smartphone sales around the world and available on a myriad of phones from a wide array of manufacturers. But its popularity is a road bump for Google. It's hard to have a seamless experience, an all-enveloping one, if all your Android devices are made by different companies and don't necessarily play nice with each other. So now Google is cracking down on how much developers can do to the software once they get their hands on it. With new smart watches, for example, Android manufacturers have little leeway to customise their offerings beyond whether they choose to make a round or square model. These restrictions are also seeping into phone software and software for the reboot of Google TV - Android TV.

Google wants users' experiences to be the same no matter which screen they might be looking at. For manufacturers, this idea does not have a great appeal, because the less customisation they can include, the less likely their product is to stand out. As was noted earlier, the Android marketplace is booming, but that also means it is very crowded. So the contradiction is that Google wants plenty of manufacture partners, but also wants them to make devices on its terms, rather than their own.

Wearable tech is certainly an area that Google is targeting. Tech companies, including Apple, see wearable tech as an important new way to distinguish their product families from those of competitors. Smart watches are not a product category in themselves, more of a way to get some added value out of the rest of the ecosystem and tie users in again. I've been considering this when looking at new phones, because the phone and watch need to work together.

Two new watches running Android were recently released: the LG G Watch and the Samsung Gear Live. Reading reviews of both has left me less than enticed. The software, which provides information on the watch screen that it draws from your smartphone, seems clunky and somehow unsophisticated, reminding me of mobile phones from five years ago. The watches are big too, and not objects of beauty, which seems odd given that a focus on style is how most straight wrist watches are marketed these days. Neither does it appear that they will be cheap - the G Watch is selling for A$249 and the Gear Live for A$250. I feel sure you could get a decent phone for that price.

So it's unlikely a smart watch has the features to tempt me away from Apple World just yet, but I'm keeping my options open. By the end of the year, there should be plenty more phones and wearable devices to choose from, and I'm still waiting for my robot butler. Now that really would fit in well with my home 'ecosystem'.

gamblecr@gmail.com