It been three years since Apple CEO Tim Cook said “the Apple Watch is most personal device we’ve ever created,” and smartwatches have evolved to become smarter, sleeker and more stylish.

They now sport fitness trackers, waterproof and payment services, with some of them being hybrids with luxury fashion brands including Emporio Armani, Fossil and Michael Kors.

Despite the advances with fanfare, smartwatches have yet to grab the mainstream for now. The global smartwatch market saw a whopping 350 percent growth in 2015 on-year but the rate has plummeted to one percent in 2016 to reach 21.1 million units, according to the US research firm, Strategy Analytics. Meanwhile, smartphones shipped 1.5 billion units last year. 



“The slow growth is simply because smartwatch has no killer apps, functions or contents to make consumers -- who already own smartphones -- open their wallets,” said Kim Jong-ki, a researcher specializing in the mobile industry at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics & Trade.

A smartwatch currently serves to tell the time, receives message notifications, makes phone calls and tracks fitness activities, which most smartphones also offer. Many features of smartwatches still lack standalone capabilities.

In order to differentiate smartwatch from smartphone, tech firms are focusing on fitness and health care-related functions by capitalizing on its wearable features.

Last week, Samsung Electronics unveiled its new smartwatches, Gear Sport and Gear Fit2 Pro, with updates of tracking and monitoring fitness, nutrition, sleep and heart rate.

Apple’s upcoming Apple Watch, slated to be unveiled this month, is also expected to empower fitness tracking and adopt a sensor to monitor blood sugar into the device. Apple recently hired a small team of biomedical engineers.

The world’s largest fitness tracker Fitbit also jumped into the smartwatch market for the first time unveiling its smartwatch Fitbit Ionic. The device tracks and monitors a user’s step count, heart rate, calories burned and sleep.

“We feel strongly that smartwatches are a platform to deliver the most advanced health tools the market has seen,” said Fitbit CEO James Park said at the prelaunch event in August, citing the reason why the firm joined the smartwatch race.

Challenges still remain.

“The health care services of smartwatch still have limitations because professional medical care cannot be involved in digital fitness devices due to regulations,” said Shin Jae-wook, a researcher at LG Economic Research Institute.

In most nations, there are restrictions on managing health care by non-medical organizations due to medical and privacy protection laws.

“But, for sure, there are needs in health care among digital device users. So that is a challenge the tech firms should solve,” Shin added.

Despite the challenges, the global smartwatch market is predicted to gradually grow -- although not exponentially -- as they are becoming more standalone and smarter, industry watchers said.

Strategy Analytics, predicted that the global smartwatch market will grow to 100 million units in 2022 from 29.7 million units this year. Apple has the largest market share with a 55 percent share by selling 11.6 million units last year, followed by Samsung’s 11.4 percent share with sales of 2.4 million units.

By Shin Ji-hye (shinjh@heraldcorp.com)