Skip to main content

What will future wearables look like? We’re still not sure after CES 2015

CES is not a sci-fi show, and that’s really the beauty of the whole thing. As fun as is it to sit in a hall and speculate with the futurists at a TED Talk or something similar, there’s a lot a to be said for a show full of promises that will actually come true in the year to come.

That’s not to say, of course, that we don’t see our share of far-out concepts at the conference, or that every product comes to fruition. But what truly powers the show are sales of actual products. As much as we in media would like to consider ourselves a driving force of the event, the truth of the matter is we only make up a portion of the “industry representatives” in attendance.

Recommended Videos

The wrist continues to almost completely dominate the wearables conversation.

It’s for this reason that CES seems like the perfect platform for a sort of coming out party for wearables, as they finally make that long-awaited transformation from fledgling prototypes to a quantifiable — and dependable — consumer category. As someone who covers the space closely, I was certainly hoping to come away from the week with some manner of codified notion of where we’re at with all of this.

I didn’t.

Granted, the dust is still settling on all of the announcements as I write this, but I’d be lying if I told you I thought we were any closer to a big picture of what wearables are going to look like, moving ahead. This time last year, we were looking at a lot of companies with a lot of different ideas about what it would take to make a breakout wearable. The big difference in 2015 is … mainly the fact that there are even more companies involved in trying to crack this nut.

As predicted, Apple once again practiced its absentee magic, with the specter of the Apple Watch looming large over the proceedings. For better or worse, the sort of industry maturity we’re hoping is often catalyzed by the success of a single product that defines the space in terms of design language and base-level features. In so many instances over the past decade, that product just so happens to have a half-eaten fruit logo on it.

Withings-Activite-Pop-hands-on_6025
Image used with permission by copyright holder

I’m sure I’m not alone in hoping that we’ll see things play out a little differently this time. It’s not due to any specific animus toward Cupertino (I’m typing this damn thing on a MacBook, after all), so much as it is a perpetual need to root for the little guy. At CES 2014, that scenario didn’t seem entirely out of the realm of possibility. After all, crowdfunded hardware startup Pebble managed to control the conversation with a flashy update to its original hardware.

This year, however, there was nary a peep out of the company, an absence that seemed to speak volumes in a show otherwise drowning in wearables. It was a vacuum, which, among other things, allowed big names to be the big names of the CES wearable parade — namely, Sony and LG.

In a sense, Sony pulled a Pebble, scoring big points with a beautiful upgrade to an existing product, namely the SmartWatch 3. It arrived at CES in a fancy new stainless steel suit, just like the Pebble Steel the year before. With the Apple Watch on the way, looks certainly matter more than they did in those earliest days, when wearing a smartwatch was a way to fly your geek flag on your wrist.

Surely next year, prettying up an existing product won’t be enough to truly garner interest.

Surely next year, prettying up an existing product won’t be enough to truly garner interest. But as the importance of style in space that’s meant to be worn on one’s person slowly dawns on CE companies, the mere act of making a nice looking product is still enough.

LG, meanwhile, made headlines by breaking from the pack with the W120L, a watch that runs a modified version of Palm’s abandoned but still much-beloved webOS. Perhaps it’s a sign of LG truly trying something new in this emerging space, rather than just staying on the Android bandwagon across product categories. Maybe it’s yet another symptom of the uncertainty surrounding wearables — after all, Android Wear is hardly a well-established presence at this point. Likely it’s some combination of the two.

Intel, naturally, showcased technology to restate its commitment to an emerging space — namely the button-sized Curie system-on-chip module. There’s only so much you can do at a show like CES when you’re essentially a components manufacturer powering future products, though the company did take the time to highlight its strange MICA (My Intelligent Communication Accessory) bracelet, another attempt to skip past the “nice-looking smartwatch” category straight into the luxury smart jewelry space.

OK, so maybe there is a codified theme in all of this — but it’s certainly no revelation. The wrist continues to almost completely dominate the wearables conversation. Sure, there were some relative wildcards like the Glagla Digitsole, which warms users’ feet in addition to tracking their steps, and the FITGuard mouthguard designed to detect head injuries early on. But at the moment the only larger trend they’re truly a part of is this nebulous category called “wearables.”

So, let’s take stock of where we are at the closing of CES 2015.

  • Lots of companies really want to break into wearables.
  • Everyone is sure that wearables are going to be huge, but there’s no cohesive narrative about how this will occur.
  • Hey, maybe Apple will make this whole thing make more sense.
  • We’ll start at the wrist and then work our way around the body from there.

I wish I could have walked away from this week declaring that CES 2015 was the year that the wearable category matured from “the next big thing” to a consumer standard, but that’s not the case. Still holding out some big hopes for 2016. See you in a year.

Brian Heater
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Brian Heater has worked at number of tech pubs, including Engadget, PCMag and Laptop. His writing has appeared in Spin…
Best Cyber Monday Smartwatch Deals: Apple Watch, Fitbit, Galaxy Watch
Best Cyber Monday Smartwatch Deals

Cyber Monday may be over, but the best Cyber Monday deals have still stuck around. Some of the other deals we've seen  have sold out fast over the weekend, so if you spot something you like below, snap it up fast. We've rounded up some of the best Cyber Monday smartwatch deals on brands like Samsung, Fitbit, and Garmin. We've even collected some Apple deals, but if you want to read about them specifically, be sure to check out our list of the best Cyber Monday Apple Watch deals.
Best Cyber Monday Smartwatch Deals
Apple Watch SE (40mm, GPS) -- $149, was $279

When the first-generation Apple Watch SE was released in 2020, we described it as the best Apple Watch for most people. While a lot of things have changed since then, including the launch of the second-generation Apple Watch SE, the original budget Apple Watch remains a worthwhile purchase in the Cyber Monday smartwatch deals for iPhone owners who want to try what it's like to own a wearable device. The smartwatch offers comprehensive health-tracking features and responsive performance, while also providing you with notifications from your iPhone.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more