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Wearable tech at CES 2014: Prepare your body parts for an onslaught of options

Wearable technology.  It's an exploding product category in desperate need of a category-defining product.  And now, with the Consumer Electronics Show upon us, we get to see whether some company, any company …

PC World Jon Phillips

Context & Ripple Effects

PC World frames CES 2014 as the moment of truth for wearable technology: an exploding product category that still lacks the single device that defines it. The story's spread is itself the signal — the same preview ran across TechCrunch, CNET, The Verge, Gizmodo, Engadget, Glass Almanac, and even Hyundai's newsroom within a day, unusual breadth for a trade-show lookahead.

The stakes read differently than they did when VentureBeat previewed the 2008 edition of CES: back then the show was about surviving a downturn with gadgets; this time the open question is whether any exhibitor can turn a pile of bands, watches, and glasses into a product people actually want on their bodies.

First-order effects

  • Exhibitors bringing wearables to CES 2014 compete not against each other's specs but against consumer indifference — the winner is whoever converts press attention into the category-defining product PC World says the market is waiting for.
  • Reviewers and retail buyers face immediate triage pressure: with an onslaught of options landing at once across the show floor, differentiation among near-identical bands and watches becomes the deciding factor for shelf space.

Second-order effects

  • Device makers pushed to stand out in a crowded field pull adjacent players in — the story reaching Hyundai's newsroom hints at cross-industry suitors, while the fashion-versus-function tension favors partnerships over pure engineering plays.
  • Suppliers of the shared building blocks (sensors, low-power displays, batteries) gain leverage as dozens of undifferentiated entrants source from the same parts bin, commoditizing the devices themselves.

Third-order effects

  • If no defining product emerges from this cycle, the category consolidates around whatever form factor survives — and the durable lesson is that wearables succeed or fail as fashionized computing, judged on what people will wear rather than what the hardware measures.

The trend: Consumer electronics is migrating from screens on desks to sensors on bodies, with each CES acting as the industry's annual audition for the device that finally makes wearables mainstream.

Related: Fashionized computing · the Consumer Electronics Show · Tech we're looking forward to in 2014: a realist's guide to CES

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