Apple’s keynote at the World Wide Developers Conference yesterday was notable for the many products the company announced. Also, for the ones it didn’t.

In two hours yesterday, Apple gave consumers and developers a slew of new products to get excited about. Completely new versions of both its operating systems in Mac OS X Mavericks and iOS 7. Three new computers in the Mac Pro desktop and two MacBook Airs. Apple’s iCloud was spread across the product line and integrated more deeply into both its operating systems. 

No other company in the world engenders more speculation than Apple. Yesterday, Apple did nothing to help that speculation by sticking basically to the script in the WWDC keynote. We knew that Mac OS X and iOS would be getting updates. We had a good idea that Apple would give us a few new computers. Apple didn’t give us “one more thing.” There were no surprises.

The lack of surprises was, well, not really a surprise. Apple tends to hold individual events for big, new products. The WWDC keynote is really for developers and any products that Apple thinks do not deserve their own big presentations. 

That being said, here is what we are waiting for from Apple but didn’t see hide nor hair of yesterday.

What Apple Didn’t Announce

An iWatch Or Wearable Gadgets: Everybody fully expects that Apple will eventually unveil a smartwatch of some sort. The media has dubbed it the iWatch. The rumors say that Apple will announce the iWatch in the fall, in time for holiday season.

A MacBook Pro: It might be greedy to expect Apple to announce four whole new computers at WWDC. Apple announced the Mac Pro desktop and two MacBook Airs. Yet, the Airs were really just an update with longer battery life. While that is great, the “wow” factor was a little missing. Apple didn’t announce any new computers with Retina display or a new non-Air MacBook. 

Any Mention Of Television: Mum has been the word from Cupertino on if Apple will ever enter the TV business full scale and as the months pass by, we do not really expect Apple to make the jump. Yet, Apple didn’t even mention its existing set top Internet box – Apple TV – in any form at the WWDC keynote yesterday. No new hardware. No new software or content features. Nothing. Apple TV is the type of product that doesn’t deserve its own special announcement and would have fit perfectly into the WWDC keynote.

The Invisible iPod: It may be about time that Apple put the iPod in its rearview mirror. Like the Apple TV, the iPod barely saw a mention at WWDC yesterday other than as a part of total iOS installations. Apple released a new iPod a couple weeks ago to zero fanfare and hardly a press release. The iPod as a featured product from Apple is likely dead.

Of course, Apple didn’t announce a new iPhone or iPad, either. Nobody expected them, too (though, it is curious that this is Apple’s first product announcement of the year, already missing the entire first quarter and most of the second). 

Were you expecting a new product from Apple and were disappointed when it wasn’t mentioned? Let us know in the comments. 

According to a report from the Financial Times, Google filed for a patent in 2011 for a concept known as a “smart-watch.” The patent was approved last October, and Google has its Android team working on integration, according to the report. 

(See also: Arm Race: Samsung To Build A Smartwatch, Too)

Google apparently gave the future of mobile technology a thorough look several years ago, and seems to have decided that wearable computing might well be the next hot area. The search giant has made waves with its Google Glasses and revealed a talking smart shoe during South By Southwest Interactive earlier this month. A smartwatch would fit perfectly into Google’s coalescing vision of wearable computing.

(See also: Apple's iWatch Ambition Is Real -- And Here's How It Might Work)

From the abstract to Google’s patent, here is its concept for what a smartwatch might entail.

A smart-watch can include a wristband, a base, and a flip up portion. The base can be coupled to the wristband and include a housing, a processor, a wireless transceiver, and a tactile user interface. The wireless transceiver can be configured to connect to a wireless network. The tactile user interface can be configured to provide interaction between a user and the smart-watch. The flip up portion can be displaceable between an open position exposing the base and a closed position concealing the base. Further, the flip up portion can include: a top display exposed when the flip up portion is in the closed position, and an inside display opposite the top display. The inside display can be concealed when the flip up portion is in the closed position and be exposed when the flip up portion is in the open position.

The patent description gives us a better idea on what a smartwatch might entail. It would have its own wireless connectivity (not using a smartphone’s connection, like the Pebble smartwatch does). It would have a touchscreen. It would have its own processor, likely to run the Android operating system. 

The language and the “flip up portion” is a little confusing. From the pictures in the patent filing, it looks like the watch could have a flip top that could be used as an augmented reality layer, not unlike how Google employs augmented reality in Google Glass. 

The race for the smartwatch is truly on. We have three great companies in Apple, Google and Samsung looking to push the bounds of mobile innovation and cross it with wearable computing. In the end, it looks like we as consumers become the winners. 

Here are several of Google's smartwatch diagrams from its patent:

Perspective view of the smart watch, with a flip-up portion in the closed position

Perspective view of the smart watch with a flip-up portion in the open position

Perspective view of the smart watch in a "first application" (apparently real-time price and health-benefit comparison of coffee drinks)

Perspective view of the smart watch in a "second application" (apparently real-time urban navigation)

According to a report from Bloomberg, Samsung has been readying a smartwatch to release to market for quite some time. “We’ve been preparing the watch product for so long,” Samsung Mobile executive vice president Lee Young Hee told Bloomberg. “We are preparing products for the future, and the watch is definitely one of them.”

Samsung’s disclosure to join the arm race comes about a month after we learned that Apple has a team of designers working on creating a smartwatch of its own, dubbed in rumor circles as the iWatch. Apple has already filed design patents that show off the basic outline of what the supposed iWatch might eventually look like.

Consumer Engineering: History Repeats Itself

Waltham, the first wristwatch (Wikipedia) The watch, in its most basic form, has not been thoroughly reinvented 40 years. The first digital watches came to market in the 1970s. Quartz watches, the first electronic watches, evolved at the end of the 1950s and into the 1960s. Before that, watches used mechanical movements of springs that often needed to wound on a frequent basis to function. Wristwatches came in vogue during World War I and into the 1920s. Before that, most watches were of the mechanical spring variety, attached to a chain and kept in people’s pockets. 

The watch, and clock making before it, has long been seen as the pinnacle of consumer engineering. Watches need to be small and precise, packing many moving parts into a small shell that is durable and highly reliable. Among craftsmen, the meticulous nature and precision of the watchmaker was seen as High Art. 

Just as watchmakers shrunk the concept of the clock into a portable timepieces, today’s gadget manufacturers are shrinking the smartphone into a piece of wearable technology that can perform similar functions. In many ways, history is repeating itself. From the grand metronome clock, to the desk clock, to the watch, timepieces evolved from big to small. In the digital era, computers morphed to PCs, PCs to laptops, laptops to smartphones and tablets and smartphones to, soon,  smartwatches. 

What Will A Smartwatch Be, Really?

Apple iWatch Patent Pictures Smartwatches will likely run on mobile operating systems like Android and iOS. Samsung’s executive did not give Bloomberg details on when it will produce the watch, what it will entail or when it will come out so at this point we know little about it other than the fact that Samsung has been working on the concept. There is no guarantee that Samsung will use Google’s Android operating system for its smartwatch either, with choices like Tizen available that theoretically could be morphed into a small form factor.

Since the kernel of these smartwatches will be mobile OS based, we can assume some basic functionalities to be morphed from the smartphone environment. That would likely include data capabilities, a browser of some sort, notifications (for the likes of messaging and emails), perhaps voice capabilities and certain apps like maps, music and exercise. 

The biggest advantage of a smartwatch could come in the ability to track activities through sensors. A great advantage to a smartwatch would be to take the basic capabilities of a smartphone, add in the capability to monitor heart rate, speed and distance and shrink it down into something stylish that can be worn while running or cycling. Whereas a smartphone like an Samsung Galaxy S or an iPhone is designed to perform many functions, a smartwatch could be more focused on what it does. 

This approach of basic apps plus sensors is what we see from one of the first smartwatches to hit the market, the Pebble Watch. Pebble can deliver email, SMS, Facebook, calendar, Twitter and weather updates. Pebble connects via Bluetooth to an iPhone or an Android to enable its data connection and tracking features. 

The fact of the matter is that we do not yet know what Samsung and Apple have in the works, except for the fact that each company definitely do have smartwatches in the pipeline. It will be exciting to see what each company comes out with, hopefully later this year.

What is your vision for a smartwatch? Let us know in the comments. 

Top image courtesy Shutterstock. Waltham watch image courtesy Wikipedia.

Apple's rumored foray into wearable computing fits nicely into the popular narrative suggesting that's where the future lies. We appear poised to start moving beyond gadgets and toward a world in which operating systems and voice-controlled artificial intelligence are woven into our homes, cars and lives. 

Why A Smartwatch Makes Sense

Wearable, connected devices are a natural next-step in that evolution. As Nick Bilton points out, a smart watch will be a much easier sell for everyday consumers than the cyborg-esque augmented reality glasses Google will soon be hawking. Apple has patents and plans for head-mounted displays too, but a watch is a much more natural place to start with wearables targeted to a mass market. 

With our smart watches, we'll be able to get important notifications, send and receive messages and return basic information from search engines without pulling a small electronic brick from our pockets and hiding our faces behind them. It's why early reviews of the Pebble smartwatch say it "changes the entire dynamic of being connected." 

The Pebble is a good start, but its interface is grayscale and low-res and its iOS integration remains very limited. I'm counting on Apple to produce a far more polished, better-integrated wristwatch, complete with curved glass and its usual atttention to visual detail. 

Smart, Connected Objects Galore

While they're at it, I hope the Apple iWatch team is looking into how to bake iOS into any number of other non-smartphone, non-tablet devices. They're already working with car manufacturers to tighten dashboard and steering wheel integrations. That's wise considering that soon every new car will be Internet-connected.  And of course there's the longstanding speculation about a voice-controlled smart HDTV. Apple should push forward with cars and TVs, but it should take iOS much further than that. 

For example, I'd love an inexpensive, lower-power tablet - perhaps with one of those flexible displays everyone's so excited about - that  I can hang on my kitchen wall to conveniently display my calendar, a Photo Stream, to-do items from Reminders and a simple notepad. All of it should be synced online with my other, more multi-functional devices. Perhaps it will one day talk to my connected, grocery-aware refrigerator. 

In other rooms, we could have interfaces geared toward context-relevant tasks. Again, all of it will be synced via iCloud with a version of Siri that has evolved into something like Nuance's cross-device voice-control project called Wintermute (but even better). Sure, we'll likely still have one or two central, more powerful computers, but they will be supplemented by various gadgets, appliances and connected surfaces throughout the home, office and wherever.  

Of course, when I say Apple, I really mean Apple, Google, Microsoft and whoever else wants to push these things along. Apple seems best positioned to polish futuristic concepts with a shine that will entice even techno-phobes, whereas Google could push the envelope with some truly geeky, innovative concoctions. 

Beyond The Smartphone

Tablets and (especially) smartphones have begun to change so much about our day-to-day lives, but their form factors often make for a somewhat awkward integration into our worlds. At home, we carry a tablet from room to room, its purpose changing each time we cross a new doorway. Everywhere else, we have to kepp pulling the tiny computers out of our pockets to complete all kinds of tasks. Quite often, we're just checking for the notifications our brains have been conditioned to expect, tuning out our physically present friends and family in the process.

A lot of us are looking forward to connected this future that relies less on the kinds of gadgets we lust after today, but is nonetheless more connected than ever - the network is just woven into our lives more seamlessly. Projects like Google Glass and iWatch promised to be some of the first and most important steps toward that. Hopefully we won't look too goofy in our cyborg goggles or talking to our wrists. 

Learning To Be Mobile

The smartphone, specifically the 3.5-inch touchscreen phone, was the form factor that changed everything. But now that we're used to touch and voice interfaces and mobile software, we're getting more demanding. We want easy access to the Web and our apps all the time, wherever we are.

Apple was right to halt work on the iPad to finish the iPhone first. We needed to start small to learn to use touch software and hardware. It worked; the rate of smartphone adoption was astronomical, and the rate of tablet adoption has been even faster. We get it now. The mobile applications we use most — messaging, reading, navigation, gaming — can be even better on a larger screen.

The 10-inch tablet was necessary to show that some people don't need a mouse-and-keyboard interface for anything. But tablets of that size are not really mobile devices. They're too heavy to be used one-handed, too big for reading in portrait view, ridiculous for photography, and so on. Full size tablets taught us to use tablet apps, but they were still an incremental step.

Too Many Rectangles

The era we're in now is mobile's awkward adolescence. The Android world is still focusing on 5-inch-ish things that are either huge phones or tiny tablets. They aren't good at being either of those things, but they make one important point: Lots of people don't really want a smartphone and a tablet. They'd rather just have one thing.

But then there's the mini tablet. There's the seven-inch world of Kindle Fires and Nexus 7s, and there's the eight-inch iPad Mini. The early adopters want this to feel right. As Dan Frommer is fond of saying, the iPad Mini feels like the "real iPad." It's big enough for the capabilities of tablet software, but it's small enough for true mobile use. But there's still something missing.

I still need a phone. I still need a thing that deals with voice calls and alerts us to urgent messages. I can't carry an 8-inch tablet in a pocket and whip it out whenever it vibrates. In fact, I don't want the tablet to bother me with all that communication stuff, since I'm using it for concentrating on something. So I still carry a powerful smartphone with a beautiful screen, and that makes buying a small tablet seem frivolous.

Watch This Space

And this morning, as I read a book on my phone on the subway and wished the screen was bigger, I suddenly realized why people are so excited about smart watches like the Pebble. A watch could be a "phone," couldn't it? It could be the device for short communications and reminders that I need to know about right away. And for things that require screen real estate and concentration, I could use a mobile-sized tablet. Then I wouldn't need a phone at all.

It's the phone that's the awkward size. That's the thing I drop all the time. If I had a smart watch and a tablet, I wouldn't need anything in my pocket at all. I know it sounds awkward to do a voice call on a watch, but A) voice calls are inherently awful, and B) it might not be so bad. Imagine if you could snap the device off of the wristband and hold the back of it up to your ear. A good enough microphone could make that work.

Apple is rumored to be building a smart watch (article in Chinese). This rumor says it's a Bluetooth device that connects to the iPhone. It could connect to the iPad just as easily. But it would even make a great standalone device, I say. Voice, text, calendar/reminders, weather, and you're good to go.

The one question is the camera. Do we want to hold up seven- or eight-inch tablets to take photos? Or do we want a sensor on the back of the watch, right next to the earpiece? Photography seems like the one case where a pocket-sized (smartphone sized) computer is the perfect tool for the job. But otherwise, get rid of it. Give me the big screen for thinking and doing, and a tiny one for talking.