The Apple Watch is “not as beautiful” as had...

The Apple Watch is “not as beautiful” as had been expected and “there’s something about it that smells of compromise,” Paul Gray, DisplaySearch director of European research, emailed us Thursday of Apple’s first wearables introduction (CED Sept 10 p1). Perhaps “that’s the price to pay for the screen and functionality, but Moto 360 doesn’t feel that way,” Gray said of the Motorola Android Wear smart watch that sells for $249, about $100 less than the projected price of the Apple Watch when it goes on sale to the public in early 2015. Wandering the IFA show in Berlin and watching German consumers exploring the various wearable products on display, most seemed to be “gravitating to round devices,” Gray said. LG’s G Watch, which bowed with a rectangular face and since has debuted in a round version called the G Watch R, was an “interesting” case in point, he said. “There were queues for the round one, while the rectangular version attracted much less interest. I think LG has done a great job with G Watch R, and perhaps signifies a breakthrough in that they have made an object of desire by design, not simply technology.” Gray’s first impressions of the Apple Watch are that it “doesn’t feel that high-tech,” he said. Samsung’s curved-edge OLED phone display “was the sort of styling cue I had expected from Apple,” he said. Gray is left-handed and wears his watch on his right wrist, so he thinks it will be “impossible” to for him to use the Apple Watch’s “Digital Crown” stem if he wears the watch on his right wrist, he said. “Possibly it can be worn upside down, but otherwise Apple’s fabled usability has just failed 10 percent of the population” that’s left-handed, he said. Wearables are a different animal from iPhones, where Apple has been dominant for years, Gray said. “Wearable devices are expected to express far more of the owner’s personality and taste” than iPhones do, he said. “There is no one-fits-all solution, giving an interesting market dynamic. Apple may need to spawn a family on the same platform with numerous form-factors.” Gray’s bottom-line take is that Apple may sell millions of Apple Watches, but “it feels likely to me that their accessible share of the pie is low, simply because a large slice of the population simply wants something different,” he said: “The diversity in the market makes it most likely to be a battle of platforms (iOS v. Android Wear) rather than devices. In fact, this could be a really diverse market, completely unlike most CE types. Swatch, Casio and Rolex compete in the sense that they make watches, but in reality they address totally different markets and consumers.” Apple representatives didn’t immediately comment.