Opinion Columnists Jim Mitchell

Jim Mitchell

Would you wear a smart watch or smart eyeglasses?


Are wearables the future of electronics? (Photographer: Angel Navarette/Bloomberg)

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The editorial board had a brief discussion yesterday over Richardson-based Fossil's smart watches with Google.

We decided not to editorialize about it; frankly, it is difficult for an editorial staff to write about this without the words sounding like an ad. Still, there are underlying social, cultural and business elements to this story. Will wearables be the brave new world of electronics or an idea that fails due to limited appeal?

Buzz on the Internet says 2014 is going be the year of wearable electronics. You don't carry your smartphone. You wear it, or at least wear an auxiliary, connected communications device that allows you to keep your smartphone in your pocket or purse.

This a long, long way from the days when phones were single-purpose and utilitarian. You made a call. You hung up.  You went on with your life. Unless, of course, you had to hang out near the phone waiting for someone to return your call.

Baby boomers remember the days before the old Ma Bell was broken apart. Rich or poor, your phone was a huge rotary device often tethered to the wall. If you needed to make call away from home, you went to a phone booth or asked a friend whether you could make a local call.

Heaven help you if you used a friend's home phone to make a long distance call. That was like socking them with a second mortgage payment.

Obviously, technology advances are yielding smarter, faster, mobile and cheaper communications devices. As recently as the early 1990s, a mobile phone was a brick that could double as a doorstop. Only CEOs and Wall Street types could afford those and even then just barely. It was mostly a prestige and power statement.

Then phone makers made small clamshell-shaped devices that made and received call and did little else. Still, the development bought mobility to the masses. Then came the smart phone and the designer looks, most notably the iPhone.

Now, smart phone operating systems like Apple's IOS and Google's Android are beginning to appear in clothing as fashion statements - a melding of form and function.

We've heard about the Google Glass, eyewear with a tiny screen in the corner, which carries the ultimate nerd/hipster factor in Northern California. But there is a creepy factor, too, the sense others get that you're recording every time you glance their way. Not cool. But wrist watch/ computer? Less intimidating and perhaps an more easily  acquired fashion taste.

Futurists say the next step after wearable technology will be - wait for it -  humans upgrading their bodies with tiny embedded computers. For the record, there are places on my body I'd rather not have a fashion computer - like all of it.

Years ago, I stopped wearing a watch and now rely on my Smartphone. Make a wrist/smartphone sleek and cheap enough and I just might wear a watch again.

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