Skip to main content

Why are we so ready for wearables? We’re sick of boring smartphones

MWC 2025
Read our complete coverage of Mobile World Congress

As I write these words, Mobile World Congress is closing up shop halfway around the globe. I’m sorry to say that this year, I forsook the sunny Mediterranean weather to be pummeled by a several inches of good old-fashioned Northeastern American snow this year. But having attended the show in years past, I feel pretty well equipped to tell you what the experience was like.

It was full of phones.

So, so many phones. Phones as far as the eye can see, and then further still. The Fira Gran Via venue was practically busting at the seams with the things. And if you stopped off at one of the small cafes surrounding the halls, your teeth probably struck a SIM card when you bit into your paella, because at some point, somewhere, a few snuck away from someone and fell into a pan of cooking rice.

Getting irritated at Samsung for putting out another phone is like getting irritated at the Rolling Stones for continuing to put out rock and roll records.

MWC is a bit like going to a CES that never quite figured out how to diversify its portfolio. Sure, there are other things on the show floor — maybe a car company bought a booth to show off a couple of new models, and perhaps some TV companies want to get in on the action. But on a whole, as its name implies, if you can’t use it to make late-night drunk dials or play Angry Birds, Mobile World Congress can’t really find the use in it.

For the past decade or so, this has been a pretty solid business model. Phones, after all, have become the great consumer-electronic ambassador, the one piece of technology that seeming unites us all. Pretty much everyone we encounter over the age of, say, five, these days has one. And pretty much all of them (the phones, not the people) are smart.

You would be hard pressed to find as unifying a pop-culture phenomenon in the year 2015. I know several people who couldn’t name a Kanye song, and plenty of folks who are utterly lost the minute you turn on a football game. They pretty much all own smartphones.

It’s a big part of the reason why the vast majority of big product announcements have centered around phones — well, phones and tablets, I guess. But let’s be perfectly honest for a second here: If the wonderphul world oph phablets has taught us anything, it’s that, tablets are really just big phones (mostly) without cell plans.

Samsung Galalxy S6 vs. Samsung Galaxy Edge 6
Jeffery Van Camp/Digital Trends

Low blow, I know. It may well be my own jaded veteran status speaking here, but I’m finding it hard to muster the levels of excitement I was once capable of regarding these near-ubiquitous slabs of plastic and glass. Perhaps I’m just not frequenting the right message boards (story of my life), but I don’t think I’m alone in having been somewhat underwhelmed by last week’s Samsung Galaxy S6 announcements.

I don’t mean to heap blame on Samsung here. It’s really not their fault. Getting irritated at Samsung for putting out another phone is like getting irritated at the Rolling Stones for continuing to put out rock and roll records. The fact that you haven’t listen to anything they’ve put out since Some Girls isn’t a very compelling reason for them to quit.

I’m not suggesting that the S6 is the Bridges to Babylon of Samsung phones. But one might be able to make a compelling argument positioning it’s the It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll.

Every time I glance at my wrist, I see potential.

Is this smartphone fatigue? Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s just that every product cycle, manufacturers are largely taking the same components and fashioning them into slightly different configurations.

The great smartphones arms race was pretty hot there for a while. Things got really good, really fast. Now it’s 2015, and things, on the hardware side, at least are pretty good all around. Without painting ourselves into the classic “hardware is perfect and totally finished evolving” corner, it certainly feels like the market has matured to the point where updates are largely tweaks to winning formulas.

This is almost certainly a large part of the reason why pundits have done what pundits so often do: scream from the mountain tops about the next big frontier. In this case, it’s the human body. Wearables are exciting because they feel new, but even more than that, they represent the unlimited, untapped potential of what electronics can do.

“We have the components; we have the rough form factor; we have the software. Now go, create!”

FlyShark Smartwatch
FlyShark Smartwatch Image used with permission by copyright holder

I’m wearing a smartwatch that I’m testing as I write this, and every time I glance at my wrist, I see potential. I see a shiny and exciting new form — a code that several have tried, but no one has quite cracked. That’s exciting to me. That’s the kind of excitement I once felt in the early days of smartphones, when, to stretch my tired analogy even further, the Beatles and Stones were churning out album after album in the race to become the best rock band in the world.

I get a bit of a jolt attempting to grasp the unlocked potential of that 1.6-inch screen. I have to imagine hardware designers feel much the same. As consumers, we’re in a great position: Hardware companies are convinced that they’re sitting on the next big thing, and they’re going to pull out all of the stops attempting to convince us of the same thing.

I get a bit of a jolt attempting to grasp the unlocked potential of that 1.6-inch screen.

Yes, this may sound crazy in a few years or even a few months, but this Wild West paradigm does give one the sense that anything is possible. I’m watching the Pebble Time Kickstarter drive in another tab. It’s currently up to $16.5 million. It’ll almost certainly be well over that by the time this column goes to print. Watching those numbers skyrocket fuels the perhaps crazily romantic notion that maybe this tiny hardware startup has a chance to dominate this nascent field.

In a world where Apple’s market value is higher than the annual GDP of Switzerland, that’s a pretty exciting notion. And hey, I’m hoping as much as anyone that someone comes along and knocks my stubborn socks off with a smartphone idea that makes me eat those words.

Until then, however, there’s a reason everyone’s talking about what’s on your wrist.

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…
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
How does Garmin measure stress, and is it really accurate?
Garmin Vivomove Sport dial close up. Credits: Garmin official.

Garmin watches are known for their robust activity tracking, but that's not all these fitness watches can do. Over the years, the company has been adding wellness features to its lineup of watches. These new health-focused metrics allow people to analyze their fitness and identify outside factors affecting their performance. One such factor is stress, which is something Garmin watches actively measures.
But you may be wondering—exactly how does Garmin measure stress? In this article, we break down how Garmin measures stress and delve into the accuracy of this metric. Should you trust your stress score? Read on to find out.

Is Garmin's stress score accurate?

Read more