How Wearable Tech Competes With Your Phone

This week, Apple will introduce its watch. The company will sell a lot, and the devices will help with all sorts of things, including fitness. Meanwhile, Google is presenting a major update to Android Wear. Still, I don't think we're quite as close to the age of wearables as others believe. And the main reason for that is the power of our phones.

To be useful, a wearable device—whether on your face, in your goggles, or on your body—has to be the best solution you have for a problem. And that means that it has to compete with your phone, the ever-improving supercomputer you almost certainly carry in your pocket. Wearable technology improves constantly, but so do our phones. The screens get better, the batteries last longer, the data connections improve, processors become more powerful, and endless apps are developed.

Wearables generally have some advantage in accessibility. A watch is easier to look at than the screen on a phone. Something projected in front of your eyes is much easier, particularly if you're swimming or skiing.  And anything we put on our bodies has the capacity to capture more data—about our heart rate or how we move—than a phone. But those benefits are countered by the processing capacities of our phones, and by the fact that we're so used to them. And there's the fact that you have to wear your wearable technology: which means it has to be either invisible or beautiful. And since tech companies aren't fashion companies, it's usually not the latter.

I had an interesting discussion about these issues this morning with Kristie Lu Stout, a terrific anchor on CNN International.