Wearables 2016Q3 - Is the hype lost? Too much data for runners?
During 2015 and part pf 20l6 wearables / smartwatches were experiencing the hype with a steady grow and high sales. Suddenly in 2016Q3, the time around the last quarter of the semester figures of sales demonstrated the opposite. A deep decrease in sales according to the consulting firm IDC, with a 51.6 decrease. Yes, 51.6% from the 5.6 million units shipped during the same period in 2015.
Here is a small summary:
op Five Smartwatch Vendors
Apple kept its first place as the leader in the smartwatch sector worldwide. Although it is noticeable a deep drop for the second year among the Top 5. New models and a low price can be translate in a come back, yet to be determined, since the market is still maturing and changing.
Garmin appeared with the largest year-to-year increase overall vendors. The growing list of Connect IQ-enable smartwatches and the launch of Fenix Chronos helped to position the brand and to maintain a steady growth. Garmin’s strategy is keep its product focused into the fitness sector, and not to compete with multipurpose watches, something that helps the brand to focus in only-related products and not to waste resources developing products out of their aim.
Samsung with a 9% growth from a year ago is the result of the Gear S2 smartwatc. This model is one of the few ones remaining in the market with cellular connectivity, which ended up being not a very practical functionality if you are into sports.
Lenovo (Motorola) The vendor with the deepest decline. Its sales came from mainly from the Moto 360 sport device. Furthermore, by no introducing a new model for the holidays season contributed to its decline.
Pebble with a 54% decline, was one of the starts among smartwatches in 2012 with a Kickstarter campaign. Throughout these years the company has launched different version of its original product and even a introduced a new timeline-based user interface, which, unfortunately ended with no high success. In 2016 Pebble launched another Kickstarter campaign releasing the Pebble 2. This product followed the leading tendency into fitness and equipped the device with a heart-rate sensor.
Then WHY this tendency?
There are some arguments in this topic. Some analysts say that smartwatches are not for everyone, which can be translated that some of the capabilities built-in the devices are just not useful for all users.
Since these devices are aim basically for people that are into fitness, is where the users are diversified. Some users are very into the stats and their numbers produced day-by-day, which through the time can be interesting to analyse, but so far no meaningful outcome can be obtained right away.
In my perspective, here is where smartwatches have its flaw. Smartwatches are devices that their principal function is to collect data of your training session, whatever the sports. Then, this raw data is transform in a nice visual dashboard with a bunch of stats. And then? Here is the question, what you would do with all this data?
The amount of data collected by these devices is unbelievable, but the ones taking advantage of this data are almost solely the big platforms, like Strava, which analyses the overall data collected by the users, specially if there is a big event, like a Major Marathon. Then you can see stats of Strava’s user and you can have some insights of the event, noting of course that not all runners will use this platform. Otherwise the data collect for an individual is not very illustrative. It can be in the long term, but the problem is that users won’t stay with a single device. They may change brand, the device can suffer damage, if just the user lost interest. This phenomena was well documented with the FitBit bands, where users were using them for an average of 6 months.
Now, there are the more serious runners, using mainly Garmin devices, which can give you lots of stats, specially if you are into triathlons, and then you can track progress over the weeks and catch your peak performance translated into the numbers. But not everyone knows how to do it and that’s the issue, not all users are into analyzing the stats or to store data through the years. Of course there are, but you need to patient in order to find a pattern through the training cycles, but in this case we are talking of a minority.
For example, most of the runners are recreational runners, some will abandon the sports at some point, and some are really good runners, but among them you always will see the ones that did not find useful wearing a smartwatch. In this last one, I include my self, through the years, I been storing data and just looking at it, but I did not find it very useful. I find it interesting, looking at the data through the years (3 years) and prior having an injury I catch the moment in which my pace started to decline. But, unfortunately you cannot catch on the day-by-day usage. It cannot predict this kind of situations, since the numbers depends where you are in the training cycle, and will require deep knowledge of your performance.
At the end, I like to stay simple, a GPS and avg speed is just enough, more I think is not every useful, and many runners are figuring out and just thinking why they will need a bunch of data? and what for? Even elite runners just rely in a Stopwatch and no more.
Keeping things simple in this case will be the clue to keep hype alive. Seems the market did not even mature and otherwise stepped into a deep decline.