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(Image credit: Business Insider)

Speculation has flared up this week about what Apple might think to include in an “iWatch”. This happened after Nick Bilton revealed in The New York Times blog Monday that the company has been experimenting with a curved form of Gorilla glass. Per usual, Apple has not commented on the product and we shouldn’t expect them to any time soon. But I thought it might be fun here to consider two things: first, a look at some of the many iterations of what an iWatch might look like, and secondly, a meditation on the potential uses of such a “smart watch”. Over the past few years I’ve been seeing ramblings of the coming of the smart watch, and I’m just not sure these things will be of use to twenty-first century humans. Younger people are increasingly less prone to wearing watches because, for the most part, they’ve already got a phone on their person. Are we to expect that we’ll want a smart watch in addition to a smart phone? Doesn’t such excess betray the supposed convenience of technology that made us fall in love with it in the first place?

(Image credit: Cult of Mac)

The photo at the top of this post is Business Insider’s sarcastic take on how Apple might market the iWatch. (In fairness it’s hard to know if the sarcasm is intentional on Business Insider’s part.) The hypothetical FaceTime interface suggested in the picture seems like it’d be entirely functional. There’s a front-facing camera on the watch, and enough screen space to make use of the straightforward app. I must admit that, although FaceTime wasn’t the first thought that popped into my head when I read the word “iWatch”, now that I think about it, it entirely makes sense that people would want to hold a virtual conversation while walking down the street or driving their car. I walk to and from work, and quite often I see students stopping right in the middle of a busy sidewalk to select a new song on their iPod or drivers running red lights while texting. So, since we’re not already making those considerations where we should, why not just FaceTime while we’re at it? (I’m kidding of course.) The image at the top of this paragraph represents what I think to be a more believable rendering of the iWatch (the Business Insider version doesn’t have any curved glass). Here the device clearly runs some variation of the iOS operating system. It’s even got a FaceTime camera. I wonder if this iWatch would run iBooks? Wouldn’t it be comfortable to read a book with your arm in the checking-your-watch position?

Honestly though, when I first read the word “iWatch”, I was trying to make sense of how such a device might be useful, and the thought that immediately came into my head was: “Oh great! Now I could go running and just leave my iPod Nano at home, since I’d already have my iWatch on from my work day.” But, on second thought, can you imagine running with headphones plugged into something on your wrist? That headphone chord would be flying all over the place. When I go running around Austin, it’s quite often on rocky trails. What if I slipped on a wet rock or something? Surely my headphones would rip right out of my iWatch. Maybe Apple’s also designing some series of arm bands to be worn up one’s arm that act as fasteners for the headphone cable? After all, Apple did show in their recent quarterly report that they are making more from accessories than their smart phone competitors are making from their phones.