Dell is reportedly investing in wearable tech, with an eye to developing smartwatch devices, according to a report from The Guardian. Dell itself is saying that it’s looking closely at the wearable-tech trend, with the aim of predicting what personal computing will look like in five years’ time. Sure, it’s a smart move, but it’s also an obvious one: If there’s a computer company out there with an R&D department that isn’t at least exploring wearables, they should probably just pack it in.
Of course, Dell isn’t doing anything different from what it has done for the past decade or so with R&D efforts aimed at a five-year outlook for wearables. Which is to say it’s probably missing the boat.Google is getting ready to ship its first bold experiment with Google Glass. And Apple is said to beprepping an iWatch to ship, possibly as soon as later this year, prompting the company to secure trademarks for the iWatch name in a variety of different global markets.
If this does become a trend, and if consumers actually like it and embrace it as the next wave in personal computing, Dell will be years late and probably offer something uninspiring and derivative, the same way it did with PDA and mobile/smartphone tech.
Dell had a really bad recent financial quarter, and is seeing its global share of PC sales slip continually – not great when that’s a market that’s already facing problems. News that it’s looking to wearables as a life raft shouldn’t exactly be taken as uplifting, but at least it’s a sign the company still has a pulse.
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