Brief: Thoughts on SmartWatches

I’ve always been a wearer of face watches ever since fourth grade – cheap <$50 ones that became increasingly difficult to replace the batteries on. When one of my watches finally only lasted about 3 years, I decided to try using only my iPhone (then 3G) for checking the time. I remained like that until January of this year when heated speculation on "wearable computing" from Apple made me decide to get used to wearing something on my wrist again. A month later, I've found I'm checking my wrist for things it can't tell me: the current weather, and the Find Friends location of someone I'm expecting. I actually get a slight annoyance when I have to pull my phone out of my pocket to check these things. So, is there room for some sort of device on your wrist with more info than a watch? Probably. But: it'd have to have superb typography (which is why I use a face watch), probably e-ink and a Paperwhite style backlight, and be really, really small - two reasons I've never even entertained the idea of the existing products on the market. The screen size of the (6th?) gen iPod nano "watch" is the right size, but there's too much device around; but not beneath it. This is actually the size of the Shuffle but 0 bezel on all sides is probably impossible. Without the clip it's actually already thin enough and actually thinner than my watch. Still, I'd rather see a display similar in quality to the second generation Kindle Paperwhite rather than some magical LCD that works in direct sunlight without blowing out the battery.