Smartwatches shouldn't look like watches

Last week, Sony announced the Smartwatch 2, a follow-up to last year's rightfully maligned Smartwatch. As unimaginative in concept and execution as it was in name, the watch was the abject failure it deserved to be. Using the thing was awful.

It's an idea that will immediately resonate with the masses. It triggers those childhood sci-fi fantasies. But it's also certain to frustrate and confuse, because it's not how wearable tech should be implemented. Just as early tablets were hell-bent on trying to wholly replicate the function of a desktop PC, most current smartwatches are caught up trying to mimic the UX and UI of a smartphone. That's an ugly solution.

If our smartwatches can help us determine whether or not we need to pull out our phones to field a call or email, that's exciting. If they can predict our next activity and give us all the contextual information we need -- navigation, weather and so on -- that's exciting. If they can collect ambient data on us and our surroundings (our vitals, location, any nearby friends) and relay that back to our phones, to our Internet of things, to the rest of the world -- that's exciting.

But if we can do all of this without wanting to chuck the gizmo out a window, that's what will make them great.

I recently struck up a conversation with an industrial designer who lamented the expectation that smartwatches have to look and function like smartphones on our wrists. In reality, they just need to effortlessly deliver important information at the moments we actually need it.

We don't need to directly interact with Twitter and Facebook from our wrists. We don't need to watch YouTube videos, either. And if we're going to take up that space on our wrist, the whole band might as well be put to good use.

Just like the phone functionality isn't the primary feature of smartphones these days, timekeeping will hardly be the main reason to wear a smartwatch, or whatever we end up calling them. By trying to fit all these exciting new ideas into an antiquated analog, we're ultimately limiting the imaginative possibilities of these devices.