Smartwatches in the library?

Smart watches have been touted as the next must-have gadget. With several models available and Apple jumping into the fray this spring, what are they and what can they do?

Besides serving as straightforward, traditional watches most of the smart watches available today serve as adjuncts to cellphones. They connect through Bluetooth to your phone and pass notifications such as incoming caller IDs and text messages from your phone to your wrist. Beyond that basic functionality however there are a lot of variations. Watchmakers are still experimenting with different feature sets to find a mix which is attractive to consumers.

The Pebble is the original in the current crop and started life as a Kickstarter campaign. It's probably the cheapest of the lot right now, starting at $100 for the all-plastic model and around $200 for the Pebble Steel. It uses the same type of black and white e-ink technology which powers Kindle displays and thus has very good battery life. It is very functional, basic looking and has an open developer kit which has led to over a thousand apps available. It has an accelerometer for step tracking, it vibrates for notifications and it works with both Apple and Android phones.

Samsung has introduced a confusing number of models over the past year, each looking for its niche. The Gear and Gear 2 serve as almost mini-phones, with separate launch screens to which you can add applications like you do on your phone. These smart watches have a microphone and speaker which allow you to take and place calls from your wrist (for hands free operation while driving), compose and send texts (either from pre-made stock replies or from scratch with voice dictation) and perform Google searches with answers read to you by the phone. The Gear and Gear 2 come with cameras which can take pictures around 2 megapixels, and also a heart rate and step tracker.  The Gears can be used with Androids and iPhones, but work best with the newer crop of Samsung phones.
Samsung also has a more fitness oriented model, the Gear Fit which has an oblong face and focuses on step tracking and heart rate monitoring.

One downside of the Samsung Gears is that they don't use the stock Android OS, they use an offshoot called Tizen. This was picked for a variety of reasons, including battery life, but a side effect is there are not a lot of apps for it yet, as developers take a wait-and-see before committing resources to developing apps for it.

Google (through Motorola) introduced the Moto 360 in late summer. It has two features which distinguish it from the other smart watches: it's round like a traditional watch, and completely integrated into Google's “Google Now” card system. Rather than a launcher and app-like interface which the Gears use, the 360 uses Google Now to act as a smart assistant to send you notifications when (it thinks) you need them. If you have a flight mentioned in your Google Calendar, Google Now will notice it and alert you when you need to leave for the airport. If you've recently used Google on your desktop or phone to search for a TV show, the watch will alert you when the next episode is on.

The Moto 360 also has very good search capabilities- you activate it by speaking the words, “Ok Google Now,” then speak your search. It is very good at “What is the temperature,” and, “Where's the closest Mcdonald's,” or “What's 234 divided by 6.”  Where it lacks is that it does not have a speaker, making it necessary to look at it to see when it's listening for you to speak, and then look to read the answer/search results. It doesn't act as a hands free tether to your phone like the Samsung Gear.

Each of the smartphones has pluses and minuses (all but the Pebble need to be charged daily) but common to most of them are criticisms that they aren't the prettiest of gadgets.  Most people wear a watch to show some personal style, and the smart watches are for the most part thick and unattractive. All of them though allow for custom watch faces on their screens (which has led traditional gear & hand watchmakers to use intellectual property laws to protect their designs).

So how does this affect libraries? Not much, yet. The Gear series' cameras are very useful for quick note taking in a library or even quick (bad) scanning. The camera automatically and quickly offloads pictures to your phone's gallery. Most watches so far seem to be going camera-less though, perhaps because of the potential ick-factor of unobtrusive cameras on the wrist (the Gears have loud shutter sound which can't be turned off).

The Moto and Gears allow for fast and easy voice Googling, which is useful for quick fact checking. Showing off my Moto to a colleague I asked, “Ok Google Now, what's the exclusionary rule?” and was immediately directed to the Wikipedia page on the subject.

Smart watches so far though have not really been widely adopted and are still a bit of a novelty. I have seen some students with them and asked a student to take his off before an exam in December. All this might change later this spring when Apple releases their smart watch, which features changeable bands and an exciting looking interface. Other smart watch manufacturers are waiting to see whether they can make smart watches cool.