Nine Things Smartwatches Need To Succeed

Apple, Samsung and Google are all rumored to be working on smartwatches. With all the buzz about these devices, it's hard to see the real use cases through all the hype. Here's nine things we think any smartwatch worth its salt (and silicon) needs:

1. There should be more than a consumer use case for them.

It wouldn't hurt — and it would almost certainly help — for our future lineups of smart watches to provide things that are valuable in an enterprise setting. Add NFC (which would be trivially easy at this point) and you have a two-factor authentication system. Ditto an edge-mounted fingerprint reader: Imagine being able to log into any computer by swiping your thumb along the side of the watch.

The poster child for smartwatches now is the Android-based Pebble E-Paper Watch, which looks promising. It mostly takes the "mini smartphone" angle. The Pebble SDK just recently became available.