There are a lot of rumours about the Apple September 9th event and a possible Apple iWatch launch. I believe most Smart watches today are largely useless. I was surprised at how quickly people abandoned their Pebble, we’re never far from our phones and continuous connection drains your phone quickly. Even the relatively small battery drain was much of negative relative the minimal value offered by notifications on my wrist. I haven’t seen anything more functional from any of the other Smart watches…

I think the iWatch might be different, mainly because I don’t believe Apple is launching it was a wearable or Smart watch. It might have watch in it’s name and some Smart Watch functionality but I believe it will be a primarily a payment device. The goal of device will be to replace your wallet and allow the existing iPhone market to join the NFC payment world. None of the existing iPhones support NFC but all support Bluetooth and I’m expecting Apple iWatch support NFC for payments over Bluetooth to the phone.

I’m expecting it won’t be the slow and clunky NFC experience we have now on Android either. The current NFC payment experience is just too slow, it often takes 30s for the Rogers Suretab wallet to complete a transaction on my Samsung Galaxy S5. Compare this with 2-3s with my credit card and I’m rarely paying with my phone.

I think iWatch might actually be an iWallet or at least reasonable contender in the payment market…