Is the Apple Watch its own killer app?

Despite the fanfare and prolific advance sales of the Apple Watch when it was launched, many technology commentators are struggling with an existential issue: what is it?

Apple is no stranger to breaking new ground or creating wildly successful product categories in areas where big names had hitherto either failed or experienced marginal success, but there appear to be some fundamental questions about what kind of device the Apple Watch is.

Is it a smaller, less capable version of a smartphone? A peripheral device for your existing iPhone? An expensive fashion statement and token of conspicuous consumption whose lifespan will be predictably brief, besieged by the twin demands of both fashion and Apple's relentless product upgrade cycle?

The cynic in me says yes, yes, and yes again, but to do so is to miss the point.

Certainly, it is a piece of wearable technology. A wristwatch for the 21st century, perhaps, but the ability to tell the time using it is a secondary benefit of building a lightweight, highly portable, multi-purpose, multi-input, multi-sensory technology platform (with a screen on it).

If I had to distil its purpose or primary benefit, it seems to come down to one thing: it is a way of breaking the iPhone's hold over our lives and the spaces between us.

That may seem like a curious direction for Apple to take, but it was in many ways inevitable.

Smartphones were the right form factor at the right time - a combination of increasing computing power, decreasing component size, improving battery technology, and the all-important touchscreen - but their presence in our lives and their everyday usage has become normalised and ubiquitous.

This ubiquity is not without precedent or prediction - back in 1995, Xerox PARC Researchers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown predicted a "third wave" of "ubiquitous computing" that would continue the move from mainframes to personal computers to ubiquitous, truly portable computation when they wrote their manifesto for "Calm Technology".

The assumption that these devices would fade into the periphery, always on but never intrusive, has proven to be (as yet) optimistic - witness the presence of phones on meal tables, the checking of social media in bars and restaurants (inherently social physical spaces).

This is where the Apple Watch (and other devices such as Android Wear) show the greatest potential - by approaching them not as miniature smartphones but as subtle, personal, even intimate platforms for timely, non-intrusive notifications and interactions we have the opportunity to unshackle ourselves from the domination of the glass-fronted monoliths that so often interpose themselves into our human affairs.

I do not need to react to every text message immediately, but if I have my phone in my pocket I have no way of knowing whether it's annoying spam or an important message from my nearest and dearest - a smart watch with a well designed notification system gives me the affordance of a subtle glance at my wrist and perhaps a quick swipe to dismiss the inconsequential, and the opportunity to politely make my excuses and deal with the essential.

Google put this very nicely when talking about Android Wear notifications at Google I/O recently - they should be glanceable, actionable, and effortless.