Updated: Swatch's Apple Watch rival is aimed at beach volleyball players

Update: Swatch is done teasing, having fully unveiled its new smartwatch, the Swatch Touch Zero One - and, oddly, it's aimed at volleyball players.

The STZO can track your health and do other smartwatch-y type stuff, but it has a leg up on the competition when it comes to detecting volleyball maneuvers like spikes, bumps and dives, reports A Blog to Watch.

And, just like Swatch promised, the wearable's Swatch battery will go months without needing to be replaced, no charging required.

The volleyball-focused Swatch Touch Zero One may not be what you had in mind when you first heard that Swatch was taking on wearables, but it could be a genius move - what better way to carve out a niche than by doing something so weirdly specific?

The Swatch Touch Zero One will retail for $160 (about £100, AU$200) when it launches, likely by summertime.

Original story follows…

When Tim Cook announced that the Apple Watch will ship in April, we felt the collective panic of every other smartwatch maker who realised they were suddenly up against the clock.

We'd consider Google's Android Wear to be Cupertino's biggest competitor right now, but another name has entered the arena. After decades of creating wrist timepieces, Swatch has confirmed that it will launch its first proper smartwatch.

The company told TechRadar that "Swatch will launch a new generation of its Swatch smartwatch in the next two to three months" after the company's chief executive officer Nick Hayek confirmed the same information to Bloomberg.

The Swiss company has an obvious head start when it comes to design, but its wristwear will hit the Apple Watch where it really hurts: the battery. Swatch's device will communicate with the internet "without having to be charged".

The watch will include "communication" (whatever that might be), mobile payments, and apps that are compatible with Windows and Android, said Swatch in a statement. No mention of iOS compatibility.

It will also launch just in time for the Apple Watch, possibly just before. While Swatch calls this the "next generation" of its smartwatch, the first-gen device, the Swatch Touch, is really only as clever as its touchscreen.

In addition to the smartwatch news, Swatch also told us that it will launch a new Swatch Touch at the end of this month.

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Apple Watch will replace your car keys, charge faster than an iPhone

We still have plenty of questions about the Apple Watch, and although we'll have to wait until March 9 for most of them to be answered Apple CEO Tim Cook has let slip some new info about the wearable slip.

It seems the Apple Watch will have the capability to replace users' car keys and key fobs, Cook told The Telegraph.

Android Wear watches are capable of the same thing, although the feature requires cooperation from car makers as well and hasn't seen wide adoption yet.

Cook didn't say exactly how it would work on Apple Watch, or whether the feature will be available when the wearable launches or some time later, but nice to hear about a new Apple Watch feature even without the details.

Cook also touched on the Apple Watch's much-discussed battery life, saying that it will last a full day - something we've heard before - and that it will charge more quickly than the iPhone does thanks to a new magnetic charger designed by Jony Ive.

Unsurprisingly, Cook has been wearing the Apple Watch every day - and even less shocking is how much praise he had for it, telling the site that can't go back to living without health and phone notifications on his wrist.

With the Apple Watch hitting wrists in April, we'll soon find out whether consumers will agree.

Samsung's Gear S is a standalone smartwatch

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How People Will Use the Apple Watch

Developers and designers debate whether the Apple Watch will find its purpose.

When Apple unveiled the first iPad in 2010, many pundits scoffed. Among the gripes: tablet computers had been tried before without success; most people already had laptops; and wasn’t it just a giant iPod Touch?

The market, as we know, reacted differently. Tablet computers are now a hit—thanks in no small part to Apple’s savvy design, which offered people something that was instantly comprehensible and easy to use, but also flexible enough to suggest thousands of new applications.

With the upcoming release of the Apple Watch, the company seems poised to repeat the trick. Despite a raft of existing smart watches from companies including Samsung, Motorola, and Pebble, wearable technology has resisted mainstream appeal, partly because the devices don’t feel particularly useful (see “So Far, Smart Watches Are Pretty Dumb”).

The advance marketing for the Apple Watch has done little to explain why this product will fare better, but the tools (WatchKit) and documentation (Human Interface Guidelines) released for app developers provides some clues. They suggest a simple, intuitive mode of interaction centered on streamlined alerts. If the market influence of the iPhone and iPad are any indication, the user experience patterns that Apple establishes may come to define what all smart watches are “for” in eyes of their users.

The Apple Watch might seem like a computer that resides on your wrist, but technically that isn’t the case. Apps that run on it are actually just extensions of iOS apps that run on an iPhone; they use the watch as an auxiliary display. This encourages developers to exploit the device as a kind of remote control for their existing iOS apps, and imagine the UX accordingly.

“You’re not allowed to run code on the watch at all,” says William Van Hecke, user experience lead at the Omni Group, a productivity software vendor that’s developing apps for the Apple Watch.

Nik Fletcher, product manager at Realmac Software, says his team “carefully reduced the core essence” of the company’s to-do list app, called Clear, in order to adapt it for the Apple Watch. Whereas the full iOS app lets users reorder tasks or mark off entire lists in one stroke, and includes animations and sound effects, the new version focuses on what Fletcher terms “recall and completion.” Upcoming reminders can be viewed using the watch’s (noninteractive) Glance view, and individual items can be crossed off. New entries must be input via the iPhone or Mac version of the software.

According to Van Hecke, any app that already emphasizes this kind of “one-bit interaction”—that is, a simple choice to confirm or dismiss information—will translate easily to the Apple Watch. “Nobody will ever expect the [watch] app to reproduce the [iPhone app’s] whole functionality, which is liberating,” he says. Many of the new device’s first-wave apps will most likely exploit what Van Hecke calls the “window on your wrist” by delivering notifications and offering simple interactions.

This, of course, raises the specter of a glut of competing interruptions. The need to sort out which notifications and functions are “allowed to tap you on the wrist” could even stimulate a new breed of meta-apps, says Laura Seargeant Richardson, a user experience expert at Argodesign, a consultancy based in Austin, Texas. “I could see an entire app dedicated to helping people think through those questions,” she says. The Apple Watch’s built-in heartbeat sensor could conceivably be used to prioritize potential interactions based on users’ stress levels.

Like existing smart watches, the Apple Watch assumes that the primary surface for interacting with apps will be an outward-facing touch screen. But the dial-like “digital crown” on the side of the device will make it easier to navigate content on a tiny display. Twisting the dial lets the user zoom in to images or scroll through lists, while clicking it brings up the home screen.

The unique promise of wearable technology lies in its intimate proximity to our bodies, which makes Apple’s inward-facing “taptic engine” particularly interesting. This lets the device deliver pulses of vibration, or haptic feedback, to the wearer’s wrist, and it is unavailable to third-party developers for now. If Apple removes that barrier, the watch’s true power as a new kind of personal communicator will be unleashed, says Richardson. “A watch is a very covert object,” she says. “I could see a new kind of private language or low-level communication emerging from this kind of wearable, using pulses or squeezes.”

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