Will Apple Watch 2 Feature A Selfie Cam?
Expect future generations of the Apple Watch to have more delightful features customers currently don’t expect. My money [is] on the Apple Watch 2 including a forward-facing camera, which wearers will discover makes taking pictures even easier and faster than using their phones.
How much you wanna bet?
There is a place for photo and video capturing on wearables. Body cams, lapel cams, action cams with helmet mounts, you name it. But one place a camera makes absolutely no sense whatsoever is on a smartwatch (or any other wristband-based solution, for that matter). And even if some company actually believed this sort of feature were benficial to the user (instead of simply existing as a marketing differentiator to bank on a few novelty/gimmick sales), they’d orient it facing outwards from the bezel. Quick environmental snaps would probably be more statistically relevant than selfies, anyways (albeit I hesitate to give humanity too much credit).
Plus, imagine trying to actually take a proper selfie — or, even better, a group selfie — off the top of your wrist. On a smartphone, you’re able to effectively hold the camera in your hand, easily twisting and bending and angling and framing the thing to get the shot just right. And straight-armed, you can hold your smartphone out a lot farther, too, getting wider, better snaps of the people you care most about (even if that’s only you).
There’s also the reality of real estate to consider. On a smartphone, there’s generally plenty of bezel for a front-facing camera. On smartwatches, however, the bezel isn’t an empty placeholder designed to house superfluous pieces of tech. Instead, its thickness is predicated entirely on the amount of mission-critical kit stuffed inside the chassis. That’s doubly true with a carefully-designed piece like Apple Watch, where future revisions are expected to shrink the bezel and expand the display as the overall form factor remains more or less the same.
And don’t forget that Cupertino makes the lion’s share of its money selling iPhones, which also happen to be the most popular cameras on the planet. Apple is unlikely to intentionally cannibalize such an important feature set of their flagship product.
(It’s also worth pointing out that the rest of Eyal’s article makes the assertion that Apple Watch won’t be any good at actually telling time. So, you know, grains of salt.)