Current smartwatch design leaves a lot to be desired. Most smartwatches are simply unattractive. There are a few people with decent-sized wrists who can pull off Galaxy Gear or Pebble Steel and look cool, but most people, especially women, take one look at these smartwatches on their smaller wrists and start laughing.
When Google and Motorola unveiled the Moto 360 smartwatch yesterday, fashion-forward tech geeks everywhere said, Finally. The Moto 360 is hands down the most attractive smartwatch we've ever seen. It has an average-sized band, which, from the pictures, looks like it can be made out of leather, rubber or metal. More importantly, the Moto 360 has a normal-looking round face, just like a standard watch.
It's amazing, really, what a few tweaks in a smartwatch's design can do to enhance the overall effect of the smartwatch on consumers. The Moto 360 is frankly the first smartwatch that looks like it belongs on the runway and in magazines. If smartwatches want to go mainstream, they have to look good. Motorola and Google seem to have grasped this very important concept and realized it with the Moto 360.
For all the talk of curved-display smartwatches, no viable candidate has appeared, except the Gear Fit from Samsung, which is still more fitness tracker than smartwtach. All the concept designs we've seen of smartwatches with curved displays don't look half as nice as the Moto 360, though. Why? because they just don't look like something any average person would wear.
The same thing happened with Google Glass. It's first edition looked awkward and strange. It's second edition, with all those gorgeous frames looks fashionable and almost normal. Wearable technology has to look fashionable and it has to look familiar. It is, after all, something that you wear and therefore an expression of your personality.
Bad design is the elephant in the room with smartwatches. It stops them from being attractive to mainstream customers and completely turns women off of the idea. There is no smartwatch currently on the market that most women would be caught dead wearing. Current smartwatches are so bulky and unattractive that they seem as though they are made only for men. While this is not necessarily true, the fact remains that big, square smartwatches look positively ridiculous on small wrists. Some of the smartwtaches are so big that they don't even fit on a woman's wrist at all.
The Moto 360, on the other hand, looks delicate enough for a woman to wear and large enough for men to wear without looking feminine. It's a great androgynous smartwatch. Once Motorola adds new band colors and designs, it will be even easier for women to pull of the Moto 360 smartwatch.
Whether Motorola intended to engage women's interest in smartwatches with the Moto 360 or not isn't the point. What's important is that Motorola will reach the other half of the population with its smartwatch and that means more customers.
Average customers will buy smartwatches only if they find them both functional and attractive. So far, we know the Moto 360 has the fashionable part down, but as no specifications of specific functions were announced on Tuesday, it is unknown just how functional the Moto 360 will be. However, given the good track record of Google and Motorola in making attractive and functional devices, the Moto 360 will most likely be one of the best smartwatches out there when it arrives this summer.
