Monday, March 16, 2015

WATCH SPECIAL ................... After 100 years, time's up for wrist watch

After 100 years, time's up for wrist watch

Apple Watch, which is being described as techno-porn, seems set to change the way we look at the human wrist

The timing of the Apple Watch is ironic. It might be a coincidence, but fact that it's being released in 2015 means that the era of the wristwatch, as we know it, is probably ending after almost exactly 100 years.
While the watch was invented in the 16th century, wrist-watches were considered to be effeminate, and so, until the early 20th century, men chose to wear pocket watches. Wrist-watches were for women, designed more as novel pieces of jewellery than for time-keeping. And while various famous watch companies claim to have been the first to invent the wrist-watch, the fact is that the idea was actually evolved by its users, rather than a manufacturer.
In the late 19th century, with advances in military tactics and the need for stealth in co-ordinating complex military operations, the watch became increasingly important. But the problem was that fiddling with a pocket watch on the battlefield was a cumbersome and potentially dangerous matter. As a result, one British cavalry officer thought up the idea of having a leather wrist strap made for himself, onto which he could attach his pocket watch for convenience.The idea quickly caught on, and the leather watch strap became a popular accessory among army officers, as well as hunters and sportsmen. But, interestingly, they used the watch strap only while they were in action; for normal use the pocket watch went back into the special pockets stitched into their clothing.
It was World War I that marked the real emergence of the wrist-watch: in 1914 it was a rarity; by 1918, when the soldiers came back from the war, almost all of them were wearing wrist-watches. And since then, for a hundred years, the human wrist has become a valuable piece of `real estate' for the watch industry , which has vied to occupy it with watches that have increasingly become statements of fashion, and of status. As a famous Rolex watch advertisement once succinctly put it, “The fact that it tells the time is incidental.“
But now the Apple Watch seems set to change the way we look at the human wrist. It keeps time with an accuracy within five-hundredths of a second. It also helps you do cool things like keep track of your health, pay your bills with a hand-swipe, and send your heartbeats to your lover. But beyond that it can do a zillion things which even Apple doesn't know yet.
And that's because those functionalities are being developed, not by Apple, but by armies of third party app developers -the kind of apps that made the iPad and iPhone so indispensable to their users.That is one of the explanations for the curious fact that Apple gave a six-month gap between launching the watch and actually shipping it out: it was mainly to give all those app developers a time-window to create all the necessary apps.A diabolically clever strategy.
The Apple Watch is just the latest in a long line of smartwatches, which can arguably trace their history back to the early 1980s, when Seiko introduced the Pulsar, the first watch to offer a pre-programmable memory bank. But the turning point was probably the launch of the Pebble in 2013.Today there is a line-up of smartwatch players, from Samsung and Sony to Google and Nike, the main difference being their relative positions on the wearable technology scale: while the others tend to be on the `technology' end of the scale, the Apple Watch is clearly at the `wearable' extreme. At the launch, Apple CEO, Tim Cook, described it as `cool', `brilliant' and `great', but the best description of its looks is probably `techno-porn'.
So what happens to conventional watches now? Some watch companies realize that it's an existential crisis and they need to respond urgently , or else. Titan, for example, one of the world's five largest watch manufacturers today, has set up a technology innovation cell named Innovedge to work with its design studio on developing smartwatches. But maybe, there's an opportunity for it to go beyond, and create a killer partnership with sister company , TCS. (Such a partnership might even result in the first global technology product out of India). Meanwhile, the Swiss watch industry is putting on a brave face. As one Swiss watch maker put it, smartwatches are merely technology toys that become obsolete every couple of years, while a classic watch is a piece of eternity .
Who knows, maybe people will adopt smartwatches for all the gee-whiz functionalities they offer, but still wear a beautifully crafted conventional watch to make a personal statement. After all, we have not just one wrist, but two.
Anvar Alikhan

TOI8MAR15

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