Smartwatches need more smart, phone-independent functions: fitness tracking and easy notification access aren't enough
Mossberg: Smartwatches Need to Get Smarter — Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Re/code by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg …
Context & Ripple Effects
Writing roughly a year into the modern smartwatch cycle, Mossberg is pushing back on the category's founding compromise: watches that mostly mirror the phone. Earlier Re/code coverage had already asked how rivals stack up against the Apple Watch, while Ars Technica framed the category's maturation as a multi-year, multi-vendor effort rather than a single product generation.
The column matters because it names the missing feature set — phone-independent function — before the market settled it. Subsequent coverage shows the stakes: by 2019 The Verge was still reviewing devices like the Fitbit Versa 2 as a 'dumb smartwatch' with bolted-on voice features, and by 2023 screenless fitness bands had been displaced by either more powerful, cheaper smartwatches or subscription-priced wearables.
First-order effects
- Apple and Android Wear makers face direct reviewer pressure to ship standalone capabilities — onboard apps, Wi-Fi, eventually cellular — rather than leaning on notification mirroring and fitness tracking.
- Swiss watchmakers' luxury-plus-activity-tracker formula looks insufficient against this critique, since an embedded tracker is exactly the 'not enough' function Mossberg identifies.
Second-order effects
- Differentiation shifts from design and band ecosystems to independence: vendors who can't untether from the phone compete downward on price, which is the dynamic that later let cheaper full smartwatches displace screenless bands.
- Bolted-on assistants get exposed as filler — the Versa 2's clumsy Alexa integration shows voice features added without genuine autonomy don't answer the independence question buyers actually have.
Third-order effects
- If phone-independence becomes table stakes, the market bifurcates along the lines the 2023 coverage describes: capable low-cost smartwatches at one end and premium wearables locked to monthly subscriptions at the other, squeezing mid-tier 'dumb' smartwatches out.
- The pattern confirms the Ars framing that smartwatch evolution mirrors the smartphone's — a multi-vendor, multi-year buildout where each reviewer-defined gap (today, independence from the phone) sets the next competitive round.
The trend: Smartwatches are following the smartphone's multi-year, multi-vendor maturation curve, with independence from the paired phone emerging as the dividing line between commodity trackers and durable platforms.