Now that smartphones are a part of daily life for many of us, consumer technology companies have begun casting about for the next Big Thing, some new billion-dollar product that will attract buyers in droves. Most of those efforts have concentrated on wearable computing products, things like Google Glass and smartwatches. So far, these gadgets have mostly been accessories you use with your phone, giving you a more convenient way to access the computer in your pocket without actually having to fish it out (at least, that's how it works in theory).

Google Glass is still in beta (and is only slowly coming into focus as Google releases mild hardware revisions and software updates), but there are quite a few smartwatches that you could run out and buy right now if you really wanted to. The problem is, most of them come with a boatload of caveats—the same kind of awkward, adolescent products that populated the MP3 player market before the iPod or the smartphone market before the iPhone. There's promise in the Pebble, in Samsung's Galaxy Gear, and in Qualcomm's Toq, but none of them are really good enough to move beyond the early adopter pool and on to your wrist.

CES is under a month away, and we'd be surprised if the show floor wasn't crawling with watches. If any of them are to succeed, they need to go beyond the first-generation products and iron out their very real flaws.

First and foremost, a smartwatch needs to be useful. This seems pretty self-evident, but it's something the current crop of products can't always do—telling me I have an e-mail or text without letting me respond right from the watch doesn’t save me a trip to my pocket. If I can only send canned texts, or if I can respond to texts but not to e-mails, or if I can only read e-mail messages from certain e-mail apps, all of it disrupts my normal workflow and makes a watch that much less convenient. Likewise, releasing a watch with only a bare handful of apps and no third-party APIs or SDKs makes it more difficult for other people to make your watch more useful.

No matter what it does, a smartwatch also needs to be reliable. Ars reviews editor Lee Hutchinson noted in his Toq review that the watch would often fail to respond to taps, making interaction with the watch more frustrating than it should have been. If I spend more time troubleshooting or working around your eccentricities than it would have taken me to get my phone out of my pocket, you have defeated the purpose.

By the same token, your watch needs to be fast (or maybe, more accurately, it needs to feel fast). This will require a combination of hardware engineering and software engineering. Mobile chips are getting pretty speedy these days, but the space-constrained body of a watch means you'll need to use something smaller and slower to get by. Tune your software to run well on that hardware, whether you're trying to make your own watch OS or you're just trying to shrink down Android.

A fast watch that only lasts for 37 minutes won't be good to anyone, so your watch will also need to be long-lasting. In the move from "feature" phones to smartphones, most people have gotten used to plugging in every night—even the longest-lasting smartphone will have trouble lasting for multiple days on a single charge. People could also get used to plugging their watches in every night, but ideally we'd like to see them last multiple days like the Toq does.

A nice screen can be, if anything, an even bigger drag on your battery than the processor, but your watch still needs to be readable. The Galaxy Gear actually does a fine job in this regard. It has a reasonably dense AMOLED display that's not perfect, but it's much more attractive than the Game Boy Color-esque screen of the Toq or the TI-83-esque display of the Pebble. More than anything else on our list, the wish for a watch that is both long-lasting and nice to read are in conflict, but we're hopeful that either AMOLED or Qualcomm's Mirasol tech can improve enough to make such a watch plausible.

Even a watch that could do all of these things would be disappointing if it's not also widely-compatible. Assuming that your watch will ride shotgun to your phone, it needs to be able to interface with many different kinds of phones from multiple manufacturers and ecosystems. The Gear is the worst offender in this regard, since as of this writing it's compatible only with a small number of recent high-end Samsung devices, but the Android-only Toq isn't ideal either. Some of this will rely on API and system-level support from your phone's operating system, but if Pebble can play nice with an iPhone other watches should be able to as well.

Any watch is part tool and part fashion accessory, but all current smartwatches are sorely lacking in aesthetics. In designing a fashionable watch, we'd like more manufacturers to look toward “timeless” (PUN INTENDED) designs, the watches people still buy and wear and spend too much money on even though their phones tell the time just fine. They don’t look like this. Smartwatches need to pick up more leather and metal and move away from rubber and plastic—think more Swiss luxury, less free-inside-cereal-box.

Last but certainly not least, your watch needs to be affordable. Ideally, a smartwatch should not cost as much as an actual phone. It's a tall order to demand all of the above in a device that costs $99 or $149, but gadgets like the iPod touch or the Nexus 7 or the Moto G cost much less than the Gear or the Toq, and they're all high-quality devices that can do a whole lot more than the watches can.

The smartwatch category has a lot of potential, but it also has a lot to prove. It’s not a given that smartwatches are going to succeed, but one that could do all (or most) of the above would be much closer than anything that has been released to date. We’ve seen many of these aspects individually in smartwatches so far, but none of the current crop has gotten everything right. Here's to hoping that the second and third waves of products are steps in the right direction.