You're missing nothing - yet. Like _refugee_ I break things. Mainly because I consider them part of my body and I'm used to my body healing itself - more slowly every year alas - but still, it's smart. Lumps of technology don't do this, yet, unless you're living in one of David Brin's universes. My Zulu is currently winging its way to Bjorn because I free-dived off the south coast of England in a heavy swell and the combination of depth, pressure, icy brine and forgetful joy forced water into the poor thing and fried its brain. Not completely, but enough for it to have a mini stroke now and again and make it unreliable. Information technology can enhance, extend and focus human faculties. I remember reading about the dislocation one might imagine was felt by those tilling the land when, previously accustomed to working from sunrise to when the sun lay straight overhead before they broke for lunch, they would now have to work until the clamour of the clock tower echoed a certain number of times, dividing the previously analog, vegetable day into discrete lumps, ones which became smaller and more accurate until we could carry them around on our wrists and localise events to milliseconds. A completely new view of the world evolving around this: accurate navigation, subtler engineering, microchips and quantised reality. We're at the point where there's pressure against such fine granularity, in order to reduce the stresses induced by modern life. I like the Yes offerings because they reconnect me with things I have become divorced from due to the way I live my life these days. What phase is the moon? What is the sense of how much day I have left before sunset? Natural rhythms that we relied upon for agriculture (or for science ) were innate and felt; from these a lot of the developed world is now detached. I, like you, am wary of immersion - not in information but in distraction. I don't want my flow disrupted by cascades of incoming blips vying for my attention and most particularly I don't want to have to plunge my head into a screen to assess it and respond to it, no matter how small it is. Whilst I can't concede the point made in TNG's post about The Shame Of Smart Phones what does strike me on public transport every time is that people's primary sense is directed away from their primary environment. The one thing that does pique my interest about the Apple device is the first tentative steps towards democratising haptic interfaces. The new paradigm in wearables I want? It has no display. It communicates entirely via vibration. Start simple with pulses for the time, when requested with a tap. Stick an EM sensor in it let it tell your wrist about invisible electrical fields. Let it give you a physical understanding of which way is magnetic north. Get smarter: the whole faceless face of the device is a multitouch pad which senses not just taps but pressure and caress. Let that be your own language for command and control of whatever you feel you want to use. Transmit a more subtle, more human haptic message to your buddy wearing the same if you wish. Ask me to charge it once a month, maybe, if it isn't trickle charging itself via solar power or leeching EM from nearby unshielded fields. Or, if I absolutely have to charge it, let it take 30 seconds And be silent, by God be silent. The measure of a well-mannered citizen in the 21st century will be how little his devices leak noise into the surrounding environment. But that's not really a watch, any more, it's something else. I'd be satisfied with that, in fact. I'll keep the Zulu on my wrist and the New Thing on the other. It feels underwhelming because it's little more than a bit of iPhone on your wrist. It feels underwhelming because people are talking about it being a fashion statement. It feels underwhelming because I think, deep down, we know we can do better.