Do watch phones have a chance to become mainstream?

Watch phones have been with us for quite some time but the idea doesn’t seem to get enough momentum cu become really mainstream and there are a lot of reasons for that like price, screen to small, worse than cellphones as functions, hard to use and such, but there is hope that things can change in the future. Let’s see why.

watch phone

Watch phone

Do watch phones have a chance to become mainstream?

As it seems there’s a shift when it comes to how people perceive watch phones. It was quite obvious for me that watch phones have no chance as alternatives to mobile phones: there just isn’t enough room to cram that much technology in a watch and not effect usability, but if you look at watch phones as accessories, things to use together with a phone there’s another story.

Imagine the following scenario: you’re in a meeting, you put your phone on silent/vibrate but want to see it something really important comes up so you pair your watch to the phone and wait for messages or important calls. Once those come they’re displayed on the screen of the watch, plus it’s much more subtle to take a peak at your watch than take the phone out and check for new stuff. In this case a watch phone can prove to be quite useful, also in crowded places when you can’t hold a phone in your hand but you can watch the phone that’s already attached to your arm. Add a bluetooth headset piece to that watch phone and everyting looks normal now.

Trying to advertise watch cell phones as a replacement for phones is an error, but looking at them as accessories takes everything to another level, one where watch phones can become more and more common, plus more models will mean more competition which in turn gives us better models, with better design and features.

I can’t predict when we’ll get to buy watch phones like cakes but I bet that one thing can make us look at them as potential gadgets: bundle them with regular phones. That’s how you give people a taste of the watch phone magic and you ensure that once they depend on one, the next purchase will be also a watch phone. Building momentum and getting people to use watch phones is the key thing here and I hope other big manufacturers will consider building watch phones as for now only LG and Samsung seem serious about it.

This article was brought to you by TheWatchPhones.com, a site that deals with news, reviews and articles about wrist watch phone trend and the evolution of this idea.

Twitter’s mobile brand not as big as previously thought

A recent survey by an analytics company has revealed that Twitter, one of the leading stars in mobile website accesibility and technology may not be as entrenched in the mobile web as we might expect. When asked about which brands they want to see on their mobile phones, respondents to this research placed the microblogging service as low as 16th, behind Weather.Com and even the dying dinosaur Myspace.

twitter

But what implications will this have for Twitter as a company and as an online brand? Is this good or bad news for the Web 2.0 superstar?

Twitter’s mobile brand not as big as previously thought

This means two things for Twitter. The first is that they clearly have a long way to go if they are to get the right amount of mobile market penetration that a service like this needs to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google. This last year has seen Twitter embroiled in a number of controversies, including their site being hacked embarrassingly on a number of occasions and sensitive user data potentially stolen from their servers.

The second thing for Twitter to take from this data, on a more positive note, is that the predicted demise of their service due to Facebook’s increase in its mobile service is short sighted. Since they are not dominating the mobile world (as once suspected), they have nothing to fear from an unrelated increase in Facebook’s mobile activities. They should be more worried, perhaps, that Facebook will be able to take the ground and the initiative which they themselves may want to occupy first.

Either way, this year promises to be an interesting one in social networking, with the established brands trying to win the hearts and minds of users moving into the the new decade, and new pretenders on the horizon. The web has never looked so interesting!