The smartwatch that took the world by storm by breaking all crowdfunding records is doing great. Pebble has sold over 400,000 smartwatches in 2013, and is expecting to double its revenue in 2014. It's an amazing feat for a project that began as a crowdfunding project, and it proved to many (all?) that market really wants a smartwatch device.
Even with this success, I can avoid but feel a sort of déjà-vu, taking me back to the first days of the Android devices. Back then, we had but a single Android smartphone, and people struggled to find one such device. Now, you can find hundreds, thousands, of different models in all shapes and sizes (and prices).
In the smartwatch segment, I think we'll see the same. Smartwatches will become as common and diversified as regular watches are today, surpassing even the number of different models of smartphones. People may even have different smartwatches for different purposes, like casual wearing, a more stylish one for special occasions, and a sports model for jogging or swimming. It will soon become irrelevant to say if a smartwatch is "smart" or not, just like today the smartphones are surpassing "dumb phones".
The major casualty will be the current generation of fitness trackers, that will have little space to live within a market where smartwatches can do everything that they do... and more. But even current smartwatches will soon feel pre-historic compared to what's coming, when things like the iWatch from Apple, and a new deluge of Android Wear devices come out, offering features such as continuous health monitoring and more.
It's an exciting time to live in! :)
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