Problem with Google’s new smartwatches: they do too much

We always have email. And Twitter mentions. And text messages. And Facebook alerts. And meetings scheduled in the calendar. And so on.

All of those things are stored neatly on one’s smartphone, and we can address them when and how we want.

But what Google did this week with its new smartwatch operating system, Android Wear, was shrink the smartphone experience down to a tiny wrist-sized computer that constantly nags you with every single notification from the apps stored on your phone.

We used one of the new Android Wear smartwatches, Samsung’s Gear Live, for several hours, and the wrist doesn’t stop buzzing.

New email? Buzz. New text? Buzz. The thing won’t shut up. Plus Android Wear ties in with Google’s digital assistant service Google Now, which attempts to help you out by notifying you about stuff it thinks you want to know about like upcoming flights or package deliveries. So there are even more things to look at. This isn’t the answer. Instead of solving the problem of whipping your phone out several times a day, Android Wear makes one nervous and anxious from all this hyper-connectivity. If we are to ever go all in on a smartwatch, it needs to be simpler than this.

It’s why FitBit fitness tracker, which does a few things like tracking steps and sleeping habits does them very well. Android Wear, on the other hand, tries to do everything at once, which ends up being far too noisy and complex.

It’s also why we are curious to see how Apple’s iWatch turns out as it sounds like it’ll be much more focused than the recent crop of smartwatches. That probably won’t look good on paper, but as we learned, less is more.