Wearable technology has been around for long enough and is starting to become a modern trend. What it does is, it gets you most of the amazing facilities of your smart devices and additionally records your biological data from your daily activities, and allows you to regulate and monitor your style of living. In the past decades, there has been an unprecedented increase in the usage of wearable technology. Wearable devices like Smartwatch and Fitness tracker are becoming an essential part of modern life.
Here’s What We Know Thus Far
According to Mordor Intelligence; there will be a boom in the smart wearable market, previously valued at 216 million units in 2019, it is expected to topple over 614 million units by 2025. Having nearly 60% of the market value, Smartwatches are the thing to get. Yet, fitness trackers remain one step ahead in the game. Smart wearable has worldwide popularity. China is at the top of the world when it comes to Smartwatch business. According to analysts of Gartner, consumers are expected to spend $ 16.2 billion in 2019 to buy this device. As a result, the market share will continue growing 40% year-to-year to 74.1 million units, compared to the previous record of $53 million in 2018. North America is known as the hub for all significant technological improvements in the world. With the advent of smart gadgets, the demand is growing for more active and sophisticated wearable technologies. Smartwatches and smart bands still remain in the lead of wearables as the region has a strong foothold of wearable vendors, such as Apple, Fitbit, and Garmin, adding to the growth of the market. Apart from these companies, there are Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, Misfit, Fossil and several others are offering smart bands and watches to the consumers.
The Rising Stars
Fitbit was one of the market leaders in early 2014 with a stronghold of nearly half of the market shares at 45%. From 2010 to 2014, 10 million was the number crossed by Fitbit. Apple invaded the wearable industry in 2015 and dominated the market. As of 2018, they hold more than 50% market share of the global smartwatch market selling 9.2 million units of smartwatch which is its highest shipment ever, more than Fitbit, Samsung and Garmin combined. Recently, Apple released the Apple Watch Gen 5 which brought great success for the company. Xiaomi is also doing well in this game. The third generation of smart band Mi Band 3 from Xiaomi reached the sales volume milestone of one million units in 12 days. Kids are the new customers for the company’s target. Consequently, they launched a smart band for children called Xiaomi Mi Bunny Kids 3 in China for 599 Yuan, which is around 90 dollars. For outdoor enthusiasts, Casio, Garmin, Suunto, and other vendors are offering built-in GPS, long battery life, offline maps, and various sensors like barometer altitude and satellite connectivity. Most of them are rugged and waterproof and some even can charge themselves from sunlight. There are even smartwatches for specific activities like golfing, running, swimming and other sporting activities. Regular smartwatches can work as a personal trainer, tracking your daily activities and reminding you to drink water, keep up with your step count, keeping track of your sleep time. In the past, people had to mount phones in their hands at the time of exercise. But now smartwatch made it easier, allowing people to be more in control of their personal health.
The Arrival of a Paradigm Shift
The arrival of this new technology; the smartwatch, has brought with it a great many possibilities. Here are some significant observable phenomenons in the world right now:
Healthcare
Smartwatches have brought a massive change in the healthcare industry. It has opened new doors and opportunities for prevention and cure. New smartwatches are intelligent enough to remind patients of taking medicine. Apple promotes its watch as a fitness-maintaining device as it can measure your blood pressure, heart rate, and fall detection. The watch will also notify you to take a deep breath if you are working for a long time without any rest. Apple watches can call for an ambulance and notify your loved ones if it detects atrial fibrillation or if you fall down.
Artificially Intelligent Lifestyle
Smart wearables are coming with integrated voice assistants as well or at least lets you access your smartphone’s voice assistant. Apple watch comes with Siri and galaxy watch comes with Bixby integrated. Watches running on Google’s WearOS come with Google Assistant built-in. Smart voice assistants may yet to reach their true potential however, they can still be very helpful in managing your appointments and daily tasks. Paring your earbuds with smartwatches will let you listen to music from Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer, and Amazon Music. Smartwatches are also offering LTE connectivity, which means you don’t need to carry your phone all the time allowing you to reply to texts, check notifications, navigate and call others with ease.
A New Toy in the Same Grid
OS is important in smartwatches as they let users’ access to a lot of different apps. These apps allow the smartwatches to achieve more. They can collect your health data, trace your activity and travel logs geographically. Some Smartwatches can even be used to control smart home appliances. For example, you can operate lights, doors, washing machines, and even the oven from your watch.
New Hope for a New World
The world is moving to cashless currency. The Smartwatch industry is playing a big role here as well. The integrated chips in the smartwatch allow you to complete payment for shopping. You can make the payment through Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Garmin Pay, or any other smart app-based payment system.
Criticism of Smartwatch Usage:
Watching the success of smartwatches even brands like Armani, TAG Heuer, Louis Vuitton, and many others are entering the market with their version of smartwatches using Google’s WearOS. But, their target is entirely different from the consumer-centric manufacturers. The consumer-centric manufacturers are interested in this segment as it is an entirely new mine of information that is even more valuable. These devices can collect more intimate details like location data, personal health information, and financial data. How important this information is to those corporations, is another interesting topic that deserves its own video. In short, your health, location, and financial data are important to the companies and these devices allow the companies access to that information.
Another reason these companies are making smartwatches and smart bands because they want to keep you within their ecosystem. To keep you more integrated with their ecosystem they are coming up with these products. After acquiring a smartphone and all the supporting accessories, then the next logical thing for you is to get for yourself is a smart band or a smartwatch. If you have an iPhone, you’re most likely to own an Apple Watch. You’d get a Galaxy Watch if you have a Samsung smartphone. Companies know this type of buying behavior and that’s why they try to keep up with the competition by keeping one of their own products in that segment. The other reason companies are making smart bands and smartwatches is due to the fact that the smartphone market is getting saturated. So, there is very little room for those companies to grow. As the room for growth gets slimmer those companies need new markets to expand themselves into. Apple has made a record sale of 5.1 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2019. While their iPhone sales fell nearly 10 percent from 37 billion to 33 billion dollars. With the smartphone market becoming more intense with competition, companies are looking for new avenues they can focus on. At the rate the smart wearable market is growing each year along with the possibility of potential information, it’s understandable that those companies find the smart wearable market lucrative to invest into.
Conclusion:
So, that’s all the fuss behind Smartwatches getting popular day by day. It seems the fight for the prize positions are not going to lose heat anytime soon. Let’s wait and see what happens. For now, you probably know enough to contribute to the popularity of Smartwatches in everyday life
