How much smaller can we go?
So can screens get any smaller while still offering the opportunity to interact? Weekes again: "I think anything is possible. The user interactions will have to be different if the screen is so small, making it difficult to tap accurately, but I never write anything off." This is frankly, terrifying. You have a coin-sized screen that you literally glance at to interact with, and UI developers are suggesting we could go smaller, with an even shorter attention span.
One thing that truly surprised when speaking to these developers was the limited assistance offered by Apple. To top drawer partners like Starwood, The Guardian and Ocado. And good grief, is there a more synergistic partner to Apple than Ocado? Two days of testing is next to nothing to troubleshoot, fine tune and hone an app and it's utterly impossible to get any idea of scale in such a small window. How will your servers cope with the load? What's the lag between app and Watch (something that, it turns out, was a big issue from day one)?
The Guardian were making paper Watches like it was playschool, presumably (and this is our presumption) because they had no line from Apple as to the design of their timepiece. Everyone here was keen to push the PR line that Apple are a fine, helpful partner, for very obvious reasons, but this evidence does seem to contradict this.
The future on our wrist?
In short, it's obvious from consumers and developers alike that we're really just scratching the surface of what this product can and cannot do. By all accounts right now the Watch seems to be an evolutionary rather than revolutionary product, but that doesn't mean that there's not a killer app out there, or that the Watch can't evolve to become something as essential as your iPhone or ubiquitous as the iPad.
But equally, if you'd told us that you can do a week's shopping with two taps on a watch we'd have stared at you like you've got two, perfect horns growing out of your head.
Also, given the finite time that developers, even major partners, had with the watch and infrastructure to get apps out for launch day, by their very nature they had to be pared down and simple, with the Watch receiving a lot of stick from reviewers for the unsophisticated apps. Imagine what developers will be able to wrangle given leisurely development and testing time with the device? That's worth a glance.
