If Intel's smartwatch prototype can catch on, it would provide differentiation in an early market, and "that truly does change the game," Moorhead said.
Having a smartwatch that can run independently of the smartphone could make smartwatches appealing to more consumers "and not just the techies show like gadgets," said Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates. "Most of the current crop of smartwatch devices are really just experiments to see what the market will buy."
A smartwatch that operates independently of a smartphone is a wise direction for manufacturers, Milanesi said. "Being a notification hub will not be enough to win in this space."
AT&T sells both the first-generation Pebble and the $300 Galaxy Gear smartwatch from Samsung, which must be paired via Bluetooth to certain Galaxy devices. It has a camera, microphone and speaker and about one-half a gigabyte of storage to hold photos that are synced to the phone. Phone calls can be taken on the Gear watch but only in a speaker mode with the phone establishing the cellular connection. That means truly private voice conversations are almost impossible.
Moorhead had expected Samsung to announce an updated version of the Galaxy Gear at CES, but said Samsung will probably wait until late February at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, when Samsung is expected to launch the Galaxy S 5 smartphone.
Reports indicate that 800,000 Galaxy Gear smartwatches have sold since the device launched three months ago, but Moorhead said there is still a lot of Gear inventory waiting to be sold. "It's a bit of a disappointment that Samsung didn't announce their new watch, but with all that inventory sitting on the shelf, I don't think they are motivated to bring out something new," he said.
Some analysts are taking a wait-and-see approach to smartwatches, and said that CES will include some smaller vendors at a "Wrist Revolution" area on the show floor, which officially opens Tuesday.
Research firms Canalys and Gartner have put the number of smartwatches that will ship in 2014 at 5 million and up to 7 million, respectively, up from 500,000 that Canalys said shipped in 2013. That growth rate is phenomenal for an early-market technology, but is just a tiny fraction of the 1.3 billion smartphones that analysts believe will ship in 2014.
The likelihood that Google and Apple, and possibly Microsoft, will introduce smartwatches in 2014, might account for the ambitious growth projections.
To put things in perspective, CEA's economist DuBravac noted that there might be 20,000 new products, including smartwatches, announced this week at CES, but not all will appear on physical or virtual store shelves later this year.
"Products come in two types at CES: Those that are feasible and those that are commercially viable," he said. "A lot of what you see is intended to show what's possible, perhaps in five to 10 years."
He added: "Early on, smartwatches need to connect to smartphones, but maybe someday smartwatches will even replace smartphones."
A Neptune representative explains some of the details of the Neptune Pine smartwatch to Computerworld's Matt Hamblen.
This article, Smartwatches arrive before their time , was originally published at Computerworld.com.
Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld. Follow Matt on Twitter at @matthamblen or subscribe to Matt's RSS feed. His email address is mhamblen@computerworld.com.
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