A nice overview of history of smartwatches from Hodinkee.
“…. Smartwatches and their predecessors, wrist computers, have been the reluctant revolution. Over the years, they have come in waves, arriving with a big splash, then sinking out of sight. Even the 2003 entrance into the market by the then almighty Microsoft with its Smart Personal Object Technology (SPOT) for watches couldn’t make smartwatches mainstream.
Until 2015, what smartwatch had been a hit the way Seiko was in the 1970s, Swatch in the 1980s, or the Rolex Daytona in the 1990s? After a while, one wondered what the deal was with smartwatches: Were they a major development in watch history? A niche toy for tech-geeks? Or simply a long-running, highly entertaining freak-watch sideshow?
Apple has changed all that. The Apple effect on the watch market has been profound. The revolution now has its monster hit watch. Global sales of smartwatches totaled 4.2 million pieces in 2014, according to International Data Corp., the research firm. It rose to 19.4 million in 2015, the year Apple Series 0 (as some call it) went on sale. Apple accounted for 11.6 million of those, according to IDC estimates.
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more of this here: [The link]