Watch straps are a solved problem

I’ve never really been a watch person. I know there are people out there that really value high end, expensive watches, but I can’t imagine walking around with something worth that much money on my wrist - inevitably, I will scratch it up, smash the glass, or simply lose it. I know my limitations.

However, I am most definitely a bit of a nerd. I have enjoyed wearing vintage watches - mechanical ones, particularly automatics. The engineering behind them fascinates me, and building a mechanical device powered purely by the motion of my day impresses me.

Even so, for years, I didn’t wear a watch - like many others, I just used my phone if I needed to know the time. But, as I am a nerd, I did get pulled into the world of fitness trackers.

Now, any fitness tracker on my wrist can only be named that ironically, but I did find them useful. I like data, and devices that pulled data about my steps, my heart rate, and so on, automatically, and enabled me to review it were interesting and fun (for certain nerdy values of fun). And so, they became a fixture on my wrist, with the handy benefit of telling the time too.

I never went in for the really expensive and fancy ones, nor the full on smart watches. They didn’t seem to bring additional value to me, even if they may for others. I finally settled on Fitbit trackers, the Charge series in particular.

And they have been useful. They let me track my sleep, steps, activity levels, all sorts. And I could link the data they produced up to other systems - for a while, I had a lamp in my living room that would turn green at 6pm if I had met my steps goal for the day, and red if I hadn’t. (This did lead to there being a red light in my window quite often, but no confusion arose, happily.)

I am on my second Fitbit Charge now. I didn’t upgrade to get new features, or a more stylish device, or anything like that. I basically just wanted the same thing as I already had. Unfortunately, that meant replacing my perfectly functional device with one that was the same, but newer. Why? Because plastic breaks.

Like many other smartwatches and fitness trackers, Fitbit devices use a novel connector for their straps. They come with a silicone strap as standard, which the skin on my wrist has never liked, so I end up paying to buy some different options - for a long time, a metal bracelet style watch strap, and currently a simple elasticated fabric band.

Herein lies the problem - they attach by fitting a bar of plastic, part of the end of the watch strap, into a recess in the tracker body. There is a small plastic clip, with a catch on the underneath of the device, which locks it in place. And on my old Fitbit, one of my watch straps broke, leaving the plastic bar in the recess, impossible to remove without destroying the entire connection point.

For a while, I used a strap from a random company that included a case you slipped the device into - essentially, this problem was so prevalent that someone had brought out a product to deal with it. Unfortunately (but understandably due to the need for flexibility) this strap was also silicone, and I had to give it up - hence the new Fitbit.

Why am I recounting this? Well, partly because I am getting old and this is what we do, but also because it highlights an important point about technology and innovation. The fitness tracker is, in itself, a great innovation for me. The packing of sensors into a small and wearable form that I can have on all day and forget about is genuinely impressive. That’s why I am willing to pay for it - the benefits I get from this are worth the money.

Unfortunately, the good innovation comes with bad innovation, similarly to many smart watch brands. For some unknown reason, these companies have looked at the history of watches, of devices being worn on people’s wrists, and thought, “Nah, we can do something different”.

Watch straps are a solved problem. Leather, fabric, metal, plastic, pretty much any material you can make flexible enough to be wrapped around a wrist has been used to make them. Over the years, the way of attaching them to watches became, more or less, standardised. Yes, there are still outliers, but in general you have a spring-loaded metal bar which you put through a loop at the end of the strap, and then fit into two holes on a mounting point on the watch.

That’s it. That’s as complex as it gets. And because most watches use this, straps are interchangeable - yes, you can get different widths, but you get watches of different sizes, so that makes sense. The bars and the straps become commodity products, and must compete against all the others in the market.

And, of course, this is exactly why most of the tech companies producing smart watches and fitness trackers decided not to use this tried and true method of attaching a watch strap. Because if something is a commodity product, they find it harder to charge a premium. A novel attachment method provides an extra little barrier to entry for any competitors, and mean higher prices for simple things.

This is a tactic that tech companies have used for years in the tech sector. Proprietary ‘standards’, obfuscated APIs, specific computing devices, all of these things serve to block other suppliers from coming in to an area. They cease to compete on the innovation and value they provide, and put larger and larger barriers up so they can charge you more for things that should be commodity services.

That's why open standards, and open source, are so vital to the tech industry. Their existence actually encourages innovation - because innovation is something people are willing to pay for, while weird connectors are not.