Maybe it's all of the CES pitch e-mails that are flying around at this time of the year, or maybe it's something in the water up here in the Orbiting HQ, but it seems like we have smartwatches on the brain. Sandwiched in between our review of Qualcomm's longevous-but-mediocre Toq and a check-in with the Pebble and Basis wearables, we posted a list of criteria we thought a good smartwatch needed to meet to be successful.

Many of you had alternate suggestions about what you'd like to see in smartphones, some more involved than others. Reader tjhenn stated that the Pebble watch comes awfully close to clearing the bar—many of you agreed and expressed hope for an improved second-generation product. "In my experience the Pebble meets most of the criteria listed in the article. It's reasonably fast, reliable, works well, getting 5-6 days between charges etc. The only point I may disagree is that it's not terribly fashionable. If they could make it thinner, it would help."

Others of you suggested other products that the smartwatch makers could look to for inspiration. "Agreed, but the previous generation iPod Nano had all of these features, so clearly it's possible," wrote abhi_beckert. "It was the right size, it had a great looking touch screen, great battery life, felt fast because of an operating system custom tailored to the hardware, was actually useful (limited to audio but it did that extremely well), looked good, was compatible with any desktop pc, etc. it was even cheap. Add a few new software features, the motion monitoring hardware in the 5S, allow it to tether to an iPhone's 4G connection over Bluetooth (I already do this with my iPad), a wrist strap... That would be a great device."

Some thought that smartwatches need to pick up a few features common in their non-smart relatives. "These custom and built-in plastic (usually silicone) watchbands are NOT an improvement [over wristwatches]," said Anne Ominous. "I won't spend $100 or more (in some cases much more) for a watch that doesn't have a replaceable band. When the band inevitably wears out after a year of constant use, I want to be able to just replace the band for a reasonable cost, not the whole device! Add to that the fact that those "custom" bands seldom look like anything but the cheap POSes they are, and you have two good reasons to make your watch so it can use a conventional band."

Ars readers had even more to say when it comes to what the smartwatches should be able to do. Jdale expressed a desire for simplicity, rather than piling features on top of features: "I think a lot of early models will fail by trying to do too many things, rather than doing a few things very well."

Wrylachlan thinks that smartwatch makers would do well to integrate functions that smartphones themselves aren't particularly good at. "Two things jump to mind immediately. 1) replacing NFC smart cards for metro passes, gas cards, loyalty cards (Starbucks)—essentially anything you dig your phone or wallet out to scan. 2) Biometrics. This is a slow burn but picking up speed area of tech. It also encompasses a range of functions that are totally impossible on a phone. Triage of notifications would be nice. Navigation would be nice. But replacing all the times I need to take a card out of my wallet would we stellar."[sic]

That sort of thing can require buy-in from other entities, though, and as abhi_beckert pointed out, those players can be slow to catch on to new technologies.

Finally, some of you want a watch that can be useful even when it's not near your phone. "Looking at the article, I pretty much agree with it about what a good smartwatch should be," wrote Clearflower. "However, I think there should be another attribute added to these watches to really make them popular: the ability to do something completely different and innovative from other technologies—and marketable to the general public… The things that made smart phones and tablets popular was they could stand on their own—yes they could interact with older tech, but it wasn't a requirement to run them."

The skeptics

We heard plenty of suggestions meant to refine and improve the smartwatch, but there is a sizable contingent of readers who have yet to be convinced that the idea has merit (or, at the very least, that it has appeal beyond the circle of gadget-hungry early adopters).

"Without a breakthrough in battery technology I'm not sure smartwatches are going to be a real improvement anytime soon," wrote Daros. "Maybe some wireless charging built-in so you can just drop the watch on your dresser at the end of the day, but the public at large isn't going to want to plug in their watch every day."

Others think that the products are fundamentally flawed to begin with. "I don't think the smartwatch thing is ever really going to happen," said Dputiger in a lengthy and much-upvoted post. "Any finger-driven display is partly blocked by the finger you need to control it. This is perfectly acceptable on a smartphone, but on a smartwatch, your finger will always obscure a significant part of the data field. The amount of data you'll be able to see is smaller, which means you'll need to do more of the same sort of swiping gestures we do already. And it's a cross-body motion—you move a lot more muscles, in total, to control a smartwatch than you do a smartphone. There's no such thing as true one-handed operation where the other hand can be doing something independently."

It might be the case that we're still waiting for someone to figure out the way a smartwatch should actually work, though. Reader michael ellis day called the current crop of smartphone-dependent products "a false lead."

"I don't think the successful smartwatch will do any of the things we've seen others try to do, only better," he wrote. "The success will do something we're not even thinking of now. It will have something that none of us ever realized we wanted, and a year after it's out we'll all think it was obvious and anyone could have seen that's what was needed."

It might be that even if smartwatches improve (and they will), or if they pick up all of the features that we're all asking for (they might), they'll still remain a niche product rather than one that explodes in popularity as smartphones and tablets have. "Basically, I think that unlike the smartphone, this is forever destined to be a geek niche product," wrote AaronInGP.