At the speed of a glance

As a young man I remember going through a number of wrist watches on my way to becoming "Grown up" but I recently read an article about the younger generations that matched with my personal observations.  Young people are much less likely to wear a watch than the older generations.  My sons certainly don't, nor do their friends when they come around.  Indeed the one time my eldest son wore a watch it was because it was given to him as a gift, the youngest didn't even bow to this pressure.  They don't have the greatest role model in this though as their father also does not wear a watch!

Watch wearers cannot understand how non wearers get by but the difference is quite often reflected in the users approach to the world.  A watch is in general a single purpose object that deals with time, and not a lot else but the style and design helps them to define how they want to be seen, witness how many expensive watches you see in upper management meetings.

For my sons, their friends and indeed me there is less purpose to the watch because we all carry mobile phones and prefer to glance at them regularly.  As well as an update on the actual time this also tells us if we have messages and whether or not our battery will last!  In a sense we have returned to the days of pocket watches, but these watches do much more than just tell the time.  I would not even think of spending the sums of money that some people spend on a watch when for much less I could buy a dual core mobile phone that can do the job of that watch, a camera, a video camera, a sat nav, a gameboy, a portable DVD and even a computer.

So why is this important?  It means every time they glance at the device they can take in much more information than the older generations that stare at three hands sweeping around.  Currently I have not seen this really taken advantage of but just think about how you could improve efficiency if alongside the battery indicator and clock was a countdown for submission of a bid document or maybe a sales target flag etc.  I'm sure you can think of more creative things you could do but you get my point.

Of course for all those watch wearers that currently do both, some where along the line an effective and affordable wrist phone will come into being.  Several have tried but so far none have stuck but they will, and they will do a pretty good impression of sweeping hands while they too publish other information at the speed of a glance.