By ,
Published February 05, 2015
Smart watches—devices that channel phone alerts and notifications, act as activity trackers, and in some cases do much more—have been around for a couple years now, but do people really want them? NPD’s Wearable Technology Study found that just 20 percent of consumers say they’re interested in purchasing a smart watch, with younger consumers emerging as the most enthusiastic.
We decided to ask our Facebook fans where they stand on wearable tech, and whether they'd consider buying a smart watch in particular—and why or why not. More answered "no" than "yes," but we got a significant number of "maybes," too.
Privacy was one of the concerns people expressed about buying and wearing a smart watch. Jim Haggarty, who described himself as "strictly low tech," said, "Don't need anybody or company tracking me."
Some readers expressed an interest—with conditions. Eddie Pollard wrote, "I like the idea, but it depends on implementation, durability, functionality, and cost." We couldn't agree more.
Peter Lewis said he'd be into a smart watch: "if it comes with a GPS and a golf app to tell me how far I am from the green. Even better if I can keep score with it. Better still if it'll keep statistics for me."
Carol Hennessy has given a lot of thought to what a smart watch should be. "You shouldn't have to charge it every day," she told us. "I would really like a smart watch to have a built-in password generator and have it interact with all my devices to automatically log me in to a website with a safe password with a wave of my wrist over the device. In other words, a smart watch has to DO something for me other than be a transmitter for my smart phone before I'll buy one."
Samsung, Motorola, Pebble, Apple: Are you listening?
Find out more about smart watches and see our lab reviews of current models. And here are five questions to ask yourself before you buy one.
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