Does Anyone Want a Smartwatch?

Reading this an hour before Apple’s extremely hyped event, the answers provided to the questions asked in this article are the ones to look for:

What’s notable is the percentage of people who don’t see what makes a smartwatch particularly useful. While MP3 players could be marketed as a replacement for CD players, and smartphones could be sold as better cell phones, smartwatches have nothing to displace. Companies have to persuade people to add a device to their lives. And given that, people aren’t going to buy smartwatches unless they do something that existing devices, like smartphones or fitness trackers, don’t do—or, in any case, unless they do it better.

So far, no smartwatch has accomplished this. Sure, you can put your Galaxy Gear to your ear and make a call, or hold it in the air and take a photo, but you can do all that—and without all the calisthenics—with a smartphone. Pop-up notifications about e-mails, appointments, and missed calls can be useful, but they can also be overwhelming, and many of the existing smartwatches are worse than smartphones at letting you customize the alerts. Fitness features like heart-rate trackers are nice, but specialized fitness devices like the Fitbit already do all that.

The question is whether Apple can introduce a watch that does more.