Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As we approach Peak Smart Watch at the Apple event next week, manufacturers are racing to offer product to those who might not want to bow down to Cupertino in the coming months. The latest contender is the Moto 360, a steel and leather beauty that launched today alongside the new Motorola .

Although I’ve been duly impressed by the Samsung Gear series, you will immediately see that the design language of the 360 is far more chic. Made of a round piece of coated steel and featuring a nice leather band and Gorilla Glass crystal, the watch looks more like a Misfit Shine than a nerd accouterment.

How does it work? Well, if you’re not familiar with the vagaries of Android Wear, not very well at first. The interface consists of notifications that appear over the various watch faces available as well as a voice activated screen that allows you to ask for various pieces of information....

While I was down at CES 2014 last week, I spent a lot of time looking at smart watches. In addition to showing the date and time, these watches also alert the wearer of incoming calls, text, emails or had other applications.

I have a Pebble watch and I was interested in what other similar watches are out there. I like my Pebble, but there is one really annoying thing about it: it doesn’t show that it needs to be charged. It just stops working – goes dead.

I looked at seven watches (actually, eight, but more about that later). There were a lot more than eight at CES, but with 3,000 vendors, I did what I could. I did not look at the Samsung, OR Sony watches as there are lots of reviews of them. The ones I looked at could be divided into three broad categories: colour screen watches ($350 and up), black and white screen watches ($130 and up) and one other with unique features....