I saw a talk at SXSW back in 2012 where a person described actually useful augmented reality - an example he used was a belt buckle a person had constructed years ago, that was connected to a compass and it was rigged to vibrate whenever you were facing north. While that alone isn't particularly useful, it's a perfect example of a wearable that doesn't require a screen, but delivers useful information in a more natural way.
I found the Apple Watch to literally be a miniature iPhone on my wrist. What I'd LIKE to see are some ideas like following:
• Biometric sensors that could alert me, and emergency response if I was in the beginning stages of having a heart attack. I had a friend who's father recently had a heart attack in a Home Depot and if it hadn't been for a person who actually knew what was happening, and how to provide CPR, he would have died. Imagine if his Apple Watch immediately sent a signal at once to emergency response, his spouse etc, with his situation and location and activated a loud speaker explaining exactly what was happening. Same goes for diabetics and sugar spikes, etc. Lots of health immediacies that this could help with.
• Right now there's an app screen, just like your phone (except it's hard to actually navigate), but I don't need all those apps all the time. What if it was more contextual? For example, when I'm at the train station and I click to go to the home screen, prioritize, or only show me apps that are contextually relevant to where I am right now, or a click once more to see them all. So if I'm standing at a train station and I bring my wrist up, I'll immediately see when the next trains are. If I'm arriving home/at home, when I bring my wrist up, I don't have to navigate to to an app to change lights or unlock my door - instead those are the options I see immediately, making that easy to use (and yes, I get that this could be done with Siri, but I just can't talk to my tech, especially not in public - it's
• Not really "Feature" related, but I couldn't see the screen at all in bright sunlight, which really defeats the purpose of a watch, but definitely a device where you need to navigate the screen.
• Health/Fitness - I found the Apple Watch to be horribly unreliable in terms of measuring my activity, and telling me how many calories I'd burned. I use other devices that do this, and either they're way off, or the Apple Watch is. In addition, I feel like encouraging health/fitness should have been perhaps the biggest thing that Apple focused on here and instead it feels like a childish afterthought.
I work in tech/user experience, and I don't know anyone who thinks the Apple Watch was a success. In fact, I don't know anyone who thinks wearables in general are anything more than a fad that people are trying to force. I'm young (mid 30's), and I work in youthful environments, and I've never seen a single person I know with an Apple Watch. In fact, after I bought mine, and was disappointed, I gave it to my wife. I asked her the other day if she likes it and she said she could take it or leave it. I asked her what other people have said about it and she said nobody has even noticed it. She works at a very popular advertising agency with kids coming straight out of art college, and she said she's the only person at her work who has one. Not a good sign at all, especially coming from Apple.
In that case, what would you like to see from the AW, something enough for you to purchase it?