Hasta La Gadget!

Confession: I have a few storage boxes in my loft that contain old, but barely used, gadgets. Stowed away, still in their boxes, as if waiting for the right time to be brought out like unloved Christmas decorations.

Ignoring the generations of well-used feature phones also put in storage (thanks to the data locked up inside their tiny brains) many of these devices are gadgets that never lived up to their promise. Which may be why I haven’t been able to throw them out. It just seems wasteful since they never had a useful life.

Among this collection there is even a smartwatch. Or rather a Bluetooth watch, to give it its correct title. The smartwatch of its day, if you will.

At first glance all these boxed-up gadgets look like they’re just waiting to be plugged in to finally start paying back the debt they owe for being made in the first place. Some even look a bit glamorous, gathering an air of mystery thanks to the pelting pace of technology evolution. But pick up yesteryear’s rejects and it soon becomes clear why they’re in stasis: they weren’t good enough to be useful. This is where the mystery stops.

Here’s what passed for a smartwatch in 2008 – made by the now defunct Sony Ericsson joint venture:

The Sony Ericsson MBW-200 Bluetooth watch was only ever an accessory to a mobile phone – and a limited accessory at that. It’s a timely reminder of the pitfalls of building a smartwatch, as the tech industry’s heavy hitters scramble their fighter jets to scream towards the next must-have wearable gadget.

Sure, Pebble has proved there’s a market for some kind of wrist-mounted gizmo that connects to your smartphone and extends the experience of carrying a pocket-sized computer around with you all day every day — but boy it better be worth it.

The MBW-200 wasn’t even good at being a watch, let alone acting as sidekick to the mobile phone. It was top heavy and chunky, so that rather than sit pleasingly on the wrist, it felt like it wanted to swing around it like a high bar gymnast. While its tiny OLED screen, resting forlornly at the bottom of the watch face, wiped a third of the markings off the dial. Aesthetically it was unbalanced and, when not displaying anything, gave the watch a vacant appearance. An ugly and uneasy conjunction of old tech and new.

(It should be noted that the MBW-200 was a range of ladies’ watches – so these devices were even smaller than other SE Bluetooth watches, leaving very little room on the dial to accommodate a screen, hence its squashed situation.)

I reckon a two-inch curved screen is the largest pane that could comfortable fit on my lady-sized wrist, without pushing into bangle territory — which illustrates a key design challenge for today’s smartwatch builders: wrists not only offer very limited real estate to build on, the plots aren’t all sized the same. Ergonomically the MBW-200 was already teetering on the brink of what’s acceptable everyday wrist wear — and its circular watch face was less than one-and-a-quarter inches in diameter.

Squeeze in a SIM tray, and could an iWatch actually become the fabled low-cost iPhone?

Another ergonomic problem with this early attempt at a smartwatch were its (physical) buttons, five in all, lined along the two strap-less sides. Being small, stiff and awkwardly placed, they required two fingers to be engaged in a pincer squeeze when pressing each one. One to push the button, the other to create an equal and opposite push from the other side to stop the watch from being shunted down your wrist.

A touchscreen watch wouldn’t necessarily need any physical buttons so shouldn’t have to contend with such anchorage issues. But wrist-mounted touchscreens face other challenges — from how to protect such a large screen from the bumps and scrapes of everyday life, to how to fit in a big enough battery to power a rich, colour touchscreen display without building a chunky, ugly mess of a watch again.

Hardware aside, the absolute worst thing about the MBW-200 was its ‘smart’ functions. They just weren’t smart enough to make it worth wearing.

Setting aside the hassle of having to make sure watch and phone were properly paired each time you strapped the thing on, the OLED screen was ludicrously tiny: a mere 0.7 inches x 0.15 inches. Lengthier data (such as phone numbers) had to be scrolled to view, rather than being visible all at once. Not exactly helpful if you’re trying to figure out who’s calling. Incoming text messages were announced by a vibration to get your attention, and a text message icon appeared on the screen. This was fine except the actual message itself was not displayed. The screen didn’t indicate who it was from, either — both pretty huge constraints on usefulness.

The watch’s other main function was to allow you to reject or accept calls via two of its physical buttons. Rejecting a call had some value – say if you wanted to stop your phone ringing and didn’t want to go to the trouble of pulling it out of your bag/pocket to do that. But having a button to accept a call but no way to take the call without getting the phone out anyway (unless you already owned and had previously paired a Bluetooth headset with it and happened to have it to hand/in your ear)? Well, that feature could actually feel pretty dumb.

Will an Apple iWatch or a Samsung Galaxy watch or a Google Android watch let you talk directly into your wrist when someone calls you? And include a speaker so you have to lean in close to listen? It might have to in order to avoid being annoying, but that’s more kit to fit in and more stuff to power. Not to mention a new type of behaviour to think about: people talking into and listening to their wrists. (Albeit, that doesn’t seem so odd when you consider Google is trying to get people talking to their spectacles.)

And if you can make calls on a smartphone, could it actually work as a standalone phone? Squeeze in a SIM tray, and could an iWatch actually become the fabled low-cost iPhone? It’s a stretch but maybe a smartwatch has to be that useful to be, well, useful enough.

Five years is an ice age in technology terms so some of the MBW-200’s features weren’t as dumb as they look now. This watch was made to marry a dumbphone after all. And hey, some of what Sony Ericsson was doing five years ago, Pebble is doing now – which perhaps goes to show that despite a human appetite for a wrist-mounted computer, building something that genuinely works in that coveted, curved, convenient but constrained location is a harder problem than a lot of companies realise. Because a lot of companies have tried to make a smartwatch and made cupboard trash instead.

When I was given the watch, after some initial excitement at the concept of being able to screen calls and texts, the reality of its limited usefulness vs. the hassle involved with charging, pairing, wearing and actually using the dumb thing soon sunk in. And, well, to cut a long story short, this not-so-smart-watch was put back in its box for good.

We’re back! After a long hiatus, we’ve started up the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast, our weekly review of everything hardware. We’ll be talking about hardware startups, flagship gadgets, and the wild and wooly worlds of Apple, Samsung, HTC, and all the rest.

Featuring the TC Gadgets team, this weekly audio podcast will bring you the best we have to offer and comment on the news of the week.

We’re looking for guests! If you’d like to be featured, me a line at john@techcrunch.com. We aim to make each of these about 20 minutes long – just right for a commute – and will bring on a rotating cast of TC writers.

This week we talk smartwatches, Apple on the defensive, and the release of the Nook HD+. Enjoy!

Click here to download an MP3 of this show.
You can subscribe to the show via RSS. We’ll a direct iTunes link next week.

HTC’s new flagship smartphone, the HTC One, will go on sale in the U.K., Germany and the company’s home market of Taiwan next week, HTC has confirmed today. The rollout will then ramp up “across Europe”, North America and “most of Asia-Pacific” before the end of the April.

The company had previously said the handset would start rolling out to customers “from mid-March”.

A HTC spokeswoman provided the following statement: “HTC has seen unprecedented demand for and interest in the new HTC One, and the care taken to design and build it is evidenced in early reviews. The new HTC One will roll out in the UK, Germany and Taiwan next week and across Europe, North America and most of Asia-Pacific before the end of April. We appreciate our customers’ patience, and believe that once they have the phone in their hands they will agree that it has been worth the wait.”

The One has a 4.7-inch 1080p screen — putting it close in screen size to ‘phablet’ territory — which is topped and tailed with aluminium trim. Inside it’s powered by one of Qualcomm’s new quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipsets, clocked at 1.6GHz, and also packs in 2GB of RAM.

In looks the One resembles BlackBerry’s Z10, and that’s not the only similarity between the two companies at this point. Both have a lot riding on their respective flagships as rivals have gobbled up huge chunks of the smartphone market.

HTC needs the One to fly, having struggled to make an impact in an Android space dominated by Samsung’s Galaxy series of devices. Earlier this month the company reported its lowest sales since January 2010. Sales for the month of February fell by nearly 44% to 11.37 billion Taiwan dollars ($384 million). But with falling revenues, HTC has fewer resources to marshal in its fight with Samsung — perhaps explaining the One’s staggered rollout — making it all the more important it gets a hit with the device.

Enders Analysis analyst Benedict Evans noted recently that HTC has now “given up every penny of revenue growth it picked up from Android” — illustrating the rise and fall on the following graph:

Evans added that while the HTC One “is a very nice phone” in the current highly competitive handset market nice hardware is ” insufficient to compete”. HTC will be hoping it can prove him wrong.

Amidst Apple iWatch rumors and Google Glass sightings, it would appear that Google is actually working on its own smartwatch to be paired alongside connected Android devices. According to the Financial Times, Google’s Android arm will be the team working on the device, as opposed to the X Lab division, which handled Google Glass development.

The wearable computer market is heating up quite rapidly. Alongside Google’s Glass project, a number of smaller OEMs have launched Bluetooth-connected smart watches to work as a companion to the smartphone.

Fossil has a well-crafted MetaWatch, InPulse has the hot-selling Pebble smartwatch, and there are even a handful of quantified self devices that measure your daily activity. There’s the Nike FuelBand, the Jawbone UP, and the Basis to name a few. Add to that an Apple competitor in the iWatch, and a Samsung smartwatch to boot, and it only makes sense that Google has a watch in the works.

Google Glass takes wearable computing a step beyond the basic wrist watch. However, the rate of adoption will almost certainly be lower than that of a watch or a smartphone since the experience is such a huge change in the way we interact with digital content and our world. A smart watch, on the other hand, would feel a lot more like using a really small smartphone, and that familiarity makes the watch a great bridge between smartphones and computational headsets.

Google didn’t comment on the speculation.

However, there’s a patent owned by Google and filed in 2011 for a “smart watch” with a “flip-up display.” It would appear that the patent also provides for a touchscreen experience.

The question isn’t really if Google will build a smart watch. As small OEMs and big competitors around it flood the market with wearable smartwatches, Google will likely need to join the fight. However, it’s unclear what exactly that will look like? Does a flip-up display look like a flip phone?

From the patent filing, the “flip-up display” seems to work like a digital pocket watch, showing two displays when open and a single display on top when closed.

However, just because Google filed this patent, it doesn’t mean that Google’s Android smartwatch will look anything like it.

On the software side, Google has already proven that it can develop for new forms of computing, such as Google Glass. Even some of its already-released apps like Google Now and Field Trip seem like they would fit in swimmingly with a smart watch. Plus, we can’t forget that the acquisition of Motorola has left Google with a rather sizable hardware team.

Canon has indeed introduced a new, very small DSLR as rumored earlier in the week. The SL1 (as it’s known in the U.S.) is “world’s smallest and lightest DSLR camera,” the company says, with a body that’s around 25 percent smaller and 28 percent lighter than the Rebel T4i. It packs a new 18 megapixel APS-C sensor, Digic 5 processor, and 9-point AF system with a single center cross-type.

The AF system also boasts a brand new Hybrid CMOS AF II sensor, which makes the focus area wider for shooting in Live View with either still photos or video, and what Canon advertises as improved AF speed vs. existing EOS cameras when tracking moving subjects. The SL1 is available in a kit with a new EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM lens, which has a smoother, quieter onboard AF motor designed specifically for video shooters.

On the back there’s a 3-inch touchscreen display, which doesn’t articulate the way the one built into the T4i does, but still people have been very impressed by Canon’s implementation of touch screens on cameras and multi-touch support. The SL1 has a native ISO range of 100-12800 for stills, and 100-6400 for video, and can shoot continuously at up to four frames per second.

The SL1 will live or die on its size and weight, however, all other specs aside. Canon is clearly marketing it as an option for consumers looking for something more portable to bring with them on vacation or on sightseeing excursions. The problem is, that’s a market neatly addressed by competitor mirrorless camera lines, like the Olympus OM series and Sony’s NEX shooters. Canon’s own EOS M was criticized for flaws like AF performance, and this seems to be an attempt to make up for that deficiency.

The Canon SL1 will ship sometime in April, with a price tag of $649 for body only, or $799 for body and lens kit.

Canon also unveiled an update to its entry-level regular-sized Rebel with the T5i. The T5i has an 18 megapixel sensor, as well as a Digic 5 processor. It has a 9-point AF system, but with all cross-type points, 5 frames per second continuous shooting rate, and a Hybrid CMOS AF system, (though not the new one that’s in the SL1, judging by the release). It’s available in a kit with the new 18-55 STM lens, too, just like the SL1.

The new T5i is in virtually all ways the same as its predecessor the T4i, at least on paper. It also features a vari-angle 3-inch touchscreen display, and in fact any changes look to be in the design of the casing and slight changes to dials. Canon’s “iteration” this time around seems to not really be one at all, so if you’re a current T4i owner you’d be best to stay clear. If you can’t find a T4i for less, at least you’re still getting a great (if apparently unimproved) camera with the T5i.

The Canon T5i retails for $749 for body-only, and $899 bundles with the new 18-55mm STM kit lens. It’s also said to be shipping sometime in April.