IFA kicked off in Berlin this week and I've been doing the thing I always do this time of year, which is refresh Twitter every twenty minutes at 3am my time because none of these press conferences are scheduled with anyone outside Central Europe in mind. Samsung went Thursday, Sony went Wednesday, and between the two of them I think I've got a pretty good read on where "wearables" are headed in late 2015. Spoiler: I'm not sold.
The big one is the Gear S2. Samsung finally ditched the square face and went round, with a genuinely clever rotating bezel you twist to scroll through menus instead of poking at a screen the size of a bottle cap with your fingertip. It's running Tizen, not Android Wear, and the part that actually surprised me is that this time it'll pair with non-Samsung Android phones too. The original Gear was locked to Samsung's own hardware, which always struck me as a weirdly self-defeating way to sell a $299 accessory to people who'd already committed to a Galaxy phone and had nowhere else to go anyway.
I want to like the rotating bezel. I really do. It's the first smartwatch input method I've seen that isn't just "shrink a touchscreen keyboard until it's unusable." But I've been wearing a Pebble since the Kickstarter shipped (mine's on its second replacement strap, the silicone one just splits eventually, nobody warns you about that) and my honest experience is that the interaction model was never the problem. The problem is battery life and the fact that ninety percent of what I use the thing for is glancing at a text message and deciding it can wait. A rotating bezel is a nicer way to scroll through a settings menu I open twice a year. It doesn't fix the actual reason I sometimes forget to put the watch back on after a shower and don't notice for two days.
Sony's event was the day before, and the headline there was the Xperia Z5 line, three phones instead of the usual two, topped by the Z5 Premium with what Sony's calling the first 4K display on a phone. I'll say the thing I always say about spec races like this: at phone-viewing distance, on a screen that size, I don't think a meaningful number of people can tell the difference between 1080p and 4K, and cramming four times the pixels into the same panel mostly just means the GPU has to push harder and the battery drains faster to render detail your eye was never going to resolve anyway. It's an impressive engineering flex. I'm just not convinced it's a feature.
(Small unrelated aside: Google swapped out its whole logo on Tuesday, the wordmark and the whole visual identity, and everyone's already written the "what does this mean for branding" post, so I won't. I'll just say the new sans-serif version looks fine on a phone icon and a little like a kid's app when it's blown up huge on the homepage. That's it, that's my whole take, moving on.)
What actually strikes me watching IFA from a distance is how much of wearable design right now is still borrowing its logic from watches that don't do anything computational at all. Round face, bezel that turns, dial-like navigation. It's a good-looking object. Whether it's a good smartwatch is a separate question that a circular screen doesn't answer by itself. I'll believe the category has figured itself out when someone ships one I can wear five days straight without thinking about the charger, and neither of this week's announcements is that.
Anyway. IFA runs through the weekend and there's apparently more coming from Huawei and Lenovo before it wraps, so I might be back with a follow-up once the jet-lagged product managers finish their keynotes. For now I'm sticking with the Pebble and its one-week battery, cracked strap and all.