I think trying to input text on a wearable or other small device using a touchscreen is a fundamentally flawed concept. There are ways to do certain things well, but this just seems like it would become boringly slow terribly fast.
With wearables such as watches, we need to think of different ways to input text and interact with content on the screen and with other people using similar devices. The future of text input is not swiping at letters on a screen because it's a cumbersome hack that misses the point of wearables altogether.
Wearables are for fundamentally different types of communication than phones are. Obviously I'll get flamed for this but I think Apple is the only company thus far to have realized that. People are not going to want to be manually texting others from their watch. It's unnatural and impractical. Watches are going to be for informal communication, like quickly sending pictures, emoticons, or heuristically generated predictive text snippets.
This is cool and all but they go into this project with the assumption that manual text input on small devices is important, which to me at least, it's pretty clearly not.
Manual text input per se may not be the most important interaction with wearables. But getting this to work may be an important first step toward building, for example, a gesture-based method to interact in general with wearable devices that are resource-constraint (eg, small screen, limited voice/camera capabilities, etc).
Seems like you have some thoughts on other methods to input text when you say "we need to think of different ways to input text".
With wearables such as watches, we need to think of different ways to input text and interact with content on the screen and with other people using similar devices. The future of text input is not swiping at letters on a screen because it's a cumbersome hack that misses the point of wearables altogether.
Wearables are for fundamentally different types of communication than phones are. Obviously I'll get flamed for this but I think Apple is the only company thus far to have realized that. People are not going to want to be manually texting others from their watch. It's unnatural and impractical. Watches are going to be for informal communication, like quickly sending pictures, emoticons, or heuristically generated predictive text snippets.
This is cool and all but they go into this project with the assumption that manual text input on small devices is important, which to me at least, it's pretty clearly not.