Smart watches predicted to usurp tablets by 2018
A group of mobile researchers have boldly predicted the rise of smart watches in the coming years to challenge the dominance of tablets in the portable computing market as early as 2018.
CCS Insight has calculated that smart watches will lead a wave of wearable technologies from wristbands to spectacles in a burgeoning new category of computing, with combined sales of some 135m by 2018, half of which will stem from smart watches.
Amongst the key applications projected for such gadgets are health monitoring of bodily processes such as heart beats and fitness trackers to keep tabs of calories burnt and miles jogged.
Describing such gizmos as a mashup of technology and fashion CCS Insight director of forecasting Marina Koytcheva said: “There are very few smart gadgets that I’d want to put on myself right now — they’re all very techie-looking — but things are changing. Now that the technology has been proven, design is catching up,” she said.
“We’re still in the stone age in the era of wearable technology, but people’s awareness of the technology is growing very fast. The big manufacturers are entering the market as they try to expand their product ranges.
“For people to cotton on to smart wearables, pricing also needs to come down . . . we saw it with tablet computers.”
These items aren’t expected to replace the smartphone just yet however with Koytcheva predicting that users will continue to sync their wearables with their phones to store and compute the raw data.
In all smart watches are predicted to hit sales of 68m in 2018 according to the study, just shy of the 70m iPads sold by Apple in 2013.