Apple iWatch Could Represent A Serious Threat To Glass

In less than a decade since its appearance, the smartphone market reached its maturity peak and nowadays, coming up with something new has become a huge challenge. The smartphone market is also becoming oversaturated, meaning that in order to get noticed you really have to prove originality and long term vision. However, the brand new market of the wearable computers offers so many new opportunities to explore. Regarding the Google Glass and wearables similar to it, forecasts don’t predict a favorable faith, at least not for now. Recent studies give a bigger chance at long term survival to smartwatches rather than to head mounted devices.

Survey Monkey Audience recently attested the credibility of a survey conducted by Eric Newcomer which shows that when coming to customer preferences, smartwatches take the lead. The study found that 10% of the people questioned said they would buy the Glass, while 38% of them said that they would rather put their money on a smartwatch. However, 45% of the people questioned weren’t interested at all on the subject and 6% said they would buy them both. Another supporter of the smartwatches is an independent journalist, Jessica Lessin who also reported on her blog about customer preferences in wearables. On the other hand, when asked if they are likely to acquire one of the two devices in the next five years, 41% of them answered in favor of the smartglasses, while 62% of them in favor of the smartwatches. Do not feel bad for Google just yet as the search engine giant is also already a few steps from launching its own smartwatch gadget.

These early previsions should really make tech manufactures think twice before putting a bet on such a business. Even Apple might surprise us soon with a smartwatch launch, as recent rumors claim.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO suggested during its speech at 2013’s AllThingsD conference that he doesn’t know a lot of people attracted in the glasses idea overall, while the smartwatch idea seems to be way more catchy. Even he is excited at the idea of developing such a product and wearing it.

However, Google remains the first to have launched the head-mounted displays and it is somehow responsible of this sudden growth in the wearable technology. Recently, more and more companies seem interested in creating at least one of these devices and rumors say that Google is also getting ready to launch its smartwatch; on the other hand rumors have been claiming this since the search giant bought WIMM, the company which built the smartwatch prototype back in 2011. The first to have launched a smartphone is Samsung, but due to low performance and big limitations, the Galaxy Gear isn’t a huge success. Nike is another company caught toying around with wearable technology.

Among the conclusions of the above mentioned survey, devices like Google Glass are pretty niched and represent more of a caprice than a necessity. Some locals even ban the device and wearing it when driving could get the owner a traffic ticket, proving that smartwatches are a lot less intrusive and dangerous. As Tim Cook said, they ‘feel natural’.

However, neither Google’s Nexus smartwatch nor Apple’s iWatch seem to be coming into shape, but at least we know that the challenge has been accepted.