A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

If what we have seen in the first couple of days of CES is any indicator of what is in store for us in 2018, we can expect to be talking a lot. Most of the time, probably more like shouting commands right, left and center to devices scattered around our house, in the office and the car.

What last year was an “Alexa takes all” show turned into a stage for all vendors to show off either their support for Alexa and Google Assistant or to announce their own assistant. But as more vendors jump on the bandwagon, it is essential that a distinction is made between a voice interface and an assistant. While they might seem to be the same, they are not, and making it clear what is which will secure its success.

An assistant is an investment

For an assistant to be helpful, you will need to invest time into it. First, at least for now, the user will need to learn how to talk to it. As much as voice is a very intuitive user interface, current voice assistants just do not communicate like a fellow human being. Lack of context limits most exchanges to a set of simple questions and answers. Like a real assistant, a digital one needs to get to know you, which means to know your preferences and information such as calendar appointments, access to apps you use regularly and the devices you might want it to control for you. It’s a true learning curve that will require time even for the smartest assistant.

Of course, search queries or simple tasks that are more like commands, like “turn this on, play that, remind me of this,” require little knowledge of us on the assistant’s part. However, when you want the assistant to be proactive and start doing things for you without you asking, like a true assistant would do, that is when knowledge is power. To some extent the smarter the assistant, the less I should actually need to talk to it.

The ubiquitous nature of an assistant

In the home, my assistant should be pretty ubiquitous to be useful. This is why speakers have been such a focus for Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple. Being able to control my devices and ask questions from wherever I am in the home is key to building engagement and ultimately dependence.

At CES and even leading up to it, we have heard of other upcoming devices such as TVs, refrigerators, light switches and even showers all with an assistant inside. Soon our homes will be seeded with many devices able to assist us, and that could potentially have a voice.

As we are at the very beginning of this journey, I can understand why vendors are trying to cover all corners, as it is yet unclear what device will be the Trojan horse into someone’s home. For instance, someone might not be buying a smart speaker, but would be happy to have an assistant integrated in the new TV they are purchasing.

I would argue, however, that there is a limit for how many devices should have an embedded assistant versus being able to be controlled through an assistant. The difference, in my mind, is proportional to the value that an embedded assistant will  deliver, which must go beyond being able to execute commands. I might want to be able to control my dishwasher with voice, but I do not have to engage in conversation with it; the same can be said about my washing machine. My fridge however, could give my assistant access to a lot of information on how fresh my food is to the best temperature to maintain it fresh, to recipes that would use up what I have left in it. In order for this information to be conveyed, the fridge should have access to the internet, have a camera and have a voice and of course be smart. Embedding an assistant versus connecting the fridge to an external assistant seems to be a much more effective implementation.

If adoption of voice-enabled devices goes the way vendors are hoping for, we will also have to have a way to manage all these devices that will be voice-enabled. This could go two ways. I would either be able to call my assistant something that is device-specific, or only the assistant in the device I want will respond based on context. So I would either call my assistant for the fridge “chef,” or if I ask, “What can I cook tonight?” only the assistant in the fridge will answer me. Right now, neither of these scenarios is an option.

If I own a TV, a speaker, a phone and a fridge, all assistant-enabled, the likely scenario is that, at my cooking question, I will have my TV show me a cooking program, my speaker say, “Sorry, I am not sure how to help with that yet,” my phone will say, “Here is something I found on the internet” and my fridge will actually give me a recipe. Not very helpful!

Voice UI has value in itself

There are more devices that will benefit from a voice UI than they would an assistant. The value that a voice-first UI will deliver to users could be huge, even if there was no full-fledged assistant in the device. This is why I strongly feel that vendors should stay clear from using the term “assistant.”

Roku recently announced its Roku Entertainment Assistant, and immediately the press began asking whether it will be better than Alexa or Google Assistant. The reality is that such a comparison is unfair, because it is not an assistant. It is a voice-first UI that will let users ask to play content with their voice. If you have a Comcast remote, you can do that today. I can press a button and ask, “Play Scandal,” and the TV will show me all the ways I can watch it. This is not an assistant, it is a voice UI that saves me a bunch of steps, for which I am very grateful. Should these voice-first UIs even have a name? I would say no. As a user, all I need to know is that I can use my voice.

If you think I am overcomplicating this point, look at how hard it was for Samsung to pitch Bixby — it started out as a voice-first interface, but it was called an assistant, and because of that the reviews were fairly negative. This mostly was due to the fact that, as an assistant, Bixby did not have access to a deep pool or data, and as soon as users started to use it in the same way they would use Alexa or Google Assistant, its value was limited.

Differentiating between a voice-first UI and an assistant also brings a series of benefits for what needs to be integrated in the device, which could be helpful from a price structure perspective.

An assistant should be much more than a user interface, and I think this is where the market is struggling at the moment, because assistants are not actually that smart yet. I truly believe the smarter my assistant will be, the less I will talk to it, because the power of AI will have my assistant do her job, which is making my life easier by anticipating my needs.

Carolina Milanesi is a principal analyst at Creative Strategies Inc. She focuses on consumer tech across the board; from hardware to services she analyzes today to help predict and shape tomorrow. In her prior role as chief of research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Milanesi drove thought leadership research; before that, she spent 14 years at Gartner, most recently as VP of consumer devices research and agenda manager. Reach her at @caro_milanesi.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

I’ve been thinking about writing something about women in tech and what we have been witnessing over the past few months, but I had resisted thus far. Last week, however, when I was a guest on the Download podcast on Relay FM, I was asked my opinion about the many stories we have read in the press concerning childish CEO behavior and continued allegations of sexual harassment, from Uber to 500 Startups, and I could no longer shy away. After all, I am in tech, I am a woman and I have an opinion on the topic.

We expect more from men in tech

Women face discrimination, chauvinism and harassment in pretty much any business they’re in. For some reason, however, I think the disbelief around some of the stories that have emerged in tech comes from assuming that men in tech would be different, evolved, better. Better than the men who run Wall Street, and better than the men on Capitol Hill. That hope is buoyed by the fact that men in tech are by and large well-educated and well-traveled — they are entrusted with building our future. Men in tech are also by and large white and entitled, and often have poor social skills when it comes to women. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are, alas, exceptions.

You start to believe it is you, not them

I’ve been a tech analyst for 17 years, and while I have seen more women working in tech since the beginning, I still get excited when there is a line for the ladies’ bathroom at a tech conference. I still pay attention to how long it takes for a company to put a woman onstage at those tech conferences. And while it seems that all the big corporations have increased the number of women onstage, if you pay attention, you notice that most of those women onstage are performing demos and they are not upper management.

When I got pregnant with my daughter, female and male colleagues alike told me that my priorities would change and I would not work as hard. I was expecting this from my male colleagues, but it was disappointing to hear from my fellow female colleagues that it was expected that I would want to do less. The implication, of course, if I did not feel that way, was that I was a bad mother.

On many occasions, I was told I was “emotional”; I was asked if it was “that time of the month”; I was told to “grow a pair.” In meetings, I have been interrupted and talked over by endless male colleagues, mistaken for my colleague’s secretary, and outright ignored after making the mistake of serving coffee to guests at a meeting. At the outset of the smartphone market, I was handed pink phones with a lipstick mirror. I’d love to ask Walt Mossberg if he ever reviewed one of those! After complimenting an actor’s launch of a tech product on Twitter, I was told I was “throwing my knickers” at him. I have been the token woman on tech panels, and I was invited as a guest on a radio show because “the audience responds better to women talking tech.” And the list goes on.

Things like this happen all the time to many women. They happen so often that you start to think it is the norm, or that you are reading it wrong and taking it personally. Whether you think it is wrong or not becomes irrelevant, though, when you consider how hard you worked to get to where you are, and how much further you want to go. So you ignore it, you smile, you move on. You do what Irish reporter Caitriona Perry did in the Oval Office a few weeks ago.

Avoiding Discrimination 3.0

If things have not changed up to now, why is it important that they do? Why does it matter so much that men in tech must understand when enough is enough? Because what is going to happen when everybody in the room looks alike and behaves the same way? Of course, this applies to gender as well as race, religion and politics.

We are at a time when we are training machines to think like us. What a scary thought when it comes to how we think about women in business. What will happen when machines consider physical and psychological traits based on the beliefs that dominate society today? What if men who claim they didn’t know that it’s not normal to make advances in work situations train computers to think it is normal too?

Will women be negated from roles a priori based on the belief that “it’s much more likely to be more talking” if too many women are part of the board? Are we really building a better society if we move from paying a woman by the hour for sexual favors to buying an AI-enabled doll that will respond to its master just the way a male engineer has designed it? What will happen if self-driving cars are taught that a woman is more dispensable than a man when it comes to life-and-death situations?

We can rejoice at having female emojis representing more professions, and we should. We should continue to foster STEM among female students, but we should also know that just because they can do the job it does not mean they will be given the opportunity to do it. Let’s lean on the strong female role models we have. Let’s be supportive. Let’s have each other’s back.

A smart woman said recently that we should not just be happy to be in the room where it happens. We should be sitting at the table and make it happen. So let’s do that, let’s stop thinking that it must be us, not them; let’s stop thinking that it’s normal; and let’s get a seat at the table.

Carolina Milanesi is a principal analyst at Creative Strategies Inc. She focuses on consumer tech across the board; from hardware to services she analyzes today to help predict and shape tomorrow. In her prior role as chief of research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Milanesi drove thought leadership research; before that, she spent 14 years at Gartner, most recently as VP of consumer devices research and agenda manager. Reach her at @caro_milanesi.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

Samsung just hosted a press conference in Korea to share the findings of an investigation into what caused several Galaxy Note 7 smartphones to catch fire. You can find all the details of the findings here. In summary, there were two distinct battery issues, from two different manufacturers, that allowed the positive and negative electrodes to touch.

Getting to the root cause of the issue was paramount, but what we learned from this process has ramifications, not only for Samsung but for the industry, because lithium-ion batteries aren’t going away anytime soon. The investigation process Samsung went through over these past few months would have been quite difficult for a manufacturer without Samsung’s scale, capital, R&D facilities and workforce. Dedicating 700 researchers to evaluate 200,000 smartphones and 30,000 batteries in a newly built testing facility is dedication.

Of course, a lot was on the line here for the world’s leading smartphone maker. Trust of both users and employees was at risk, and winning that trust back was paramount.

Winning back trust that Samsung will continue to innovate

In early October, we at Creative Strategies conducted a study to assess the U.S. smartphone market. One of the areas we wanted to evaluate was the impact, if any, that the Galaxy Note 7 incident had on the brand’s smartphone market. We were bullish then, and we are bullish now, that Samsung will recover from the Note 7 recall. Only 28 percent of U.S. Android owners said the Note 7 caused them to have a more negative opinion of the Samsung brand. Numbers were even lower among Samsung owners.

Consumers are generally quite forgiving and have a relatively short memory. The car industry has seen several recalls over the years, yet consumers continue to buy. The mobile industry has also seen recalls, but nothing to the extent of the Note 7. Of course, what made the Note 7 such a test case is how passionate its users are and how unwilling they were to give up their units, pushing Samsung and carriers the extra mile to get the phones back.

Samsung was quick to take responsibility and step into action. Communication is where the smartphone leader could have done with more clarity. Whether due to cultural differences in communication styles or having the complexity of bringing together the Consumer Product Safety Commission, carriers and retailers, Samsung’s messaging was not as direct as it could have been. Digital messages, however, were pretty clear, from warnings being displayed every time the phone was charged to limiting the charging capacity of the phone to ultimately bricking the phone.

Samsung, like any vendor in every sector that has ever had a recall, cannot promise that its products will never again suffer from a malfunction. What can be done, however, is to show that necessary steps have been taken to limit the chance of that happening again.

What is even more important when we are talking about a market leader, especially one that has gained that position by adopting new technologies early, is to show that its innovation streak will not be limited by fear. Samsung must show consumers that it has set in place checks and balances that will allow the company to continue to bring new technology, new designs and new features into the market in a safe and effective way. The new eight-point battery safety check that Samsung will implement going forward is an important step in recognizing that innovation should also come to QA, testing, safety and manufacturing processes.

A market leader acting like a leader

The fact that made the Note 7 recall also unusual is that the cause of the issue involved several parties: Samsung and two battery suppliers. While we do not know the names of the suppliers, it would be safe to believe they are not exclusive Samsung suppliers. The use of lithium-ion batteries is also not limited to Samsung or these two suppliers.

Samsung’s mobile head, DJ Koh, stated during the press conference that, during the investigation, the researchers filed several patents in battery technology, patents that will be shared with the industry. We would need more details to understand the significance of these patents, but this is the kind of action we would expect from a market leader, especially one that has a pretty substantial battery business.

Despite the many stories that broke last Friday about Samsung putting the blame on its suppliers, I did not hear that in the press conference. Although I am confident that Samsung will require changes in the QA process implemented by its supplier, the focus of the messaging was centered on the changes Samsung will implement going forward, including the appointment of a battery advisory group. As much as there is skepticism around how two different suppliers could have two independent battery issues, I do not believe that Samsung cut corners in bringing the Note 7 to market. As the industry pushes more designs and features, and as users push the capabilities of these devices, making sure all that can be done in a safe manner is paramount.

Innovation needs to involve all aspects of the production process and Samsung is making this point very clear. While adding steps to the process adds costs and time, I expect Samsung to be able to integrate the new steps without adding considerable development time or costs on to new products.

What’s next?

I had initially thought that Samsung should move on from the Note franchise and deliver a different product with similar capabilities. After months of hearing countless airport announcements referring to the banned phone as the “Galaxy Note 7,” “a Samsung phone,” “the Galaxy phone” and anything in between, I no longer think the Note 8 would suffer as much as I initially thought. Better put, anything that will come after the Note 7 will equally suffer, whether it is related to it or not.

Samsung apologized, provided answers and solutions. What remains to be done is to make sure users who returned their Note 7 receive the phone they want and a little extra love from Samsung. If indeed there will be a Note 8 on the market in 2017, there is a lot Samsung can do to butter up those users, from incentives on upgrades to limited editions to early access, etc.

While I can already envision the headlines referring to the next Galaxy phone as “the one that hopefully will not blow up” or “not as hot as the Note 7,” I am hoping we will move on — like most consumers will.

Carolina Milanesi is a principal analyst at Creative Strategies Inc. She focuses on consumer tech across the board; from hardware to services she analyzes today to help predict and shape tomorrow. In her prior role as chief of research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Milanesi drove thought leadership research; before that, she spent 14 years at Gartner, most recently as VP of consumer devices research and agenda manager. Reach her at @caro_milanesi.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

On Monday, IDC released its third-quarter market share update for wearables, and it was not pretty. While overall shipments grew marginally year on year, reaching 23 million, 85 percent of sales remained in the more aggressively priced fitness bands. The third-quarter results need to account for the launch date of Apple Watch Series 2 late in the quarter.

Small as it might be, Apple is still dominating the smartwatch market, and I don’t see this changing anytime soon. In an email to Reuters, Tim Cook attempted to set the record straight:

“Sales growth is off the charts. In fact, during the first week of holiday shopping, our sell-through of Apple Watch was greater than any week in the product’s history. And as we expected, we’re on track for the best quarter ever for Apple Watch.”

The smartwatch market shares many similarities with the early tablet market

When looking at the wearables market, it’s hard not to draw a comparison to the early stages of the tablet market. As a quick reminder, after the launch of the iPad and an initial influx of tablets that tried to compete with it, Android manufacturers relegated themselves to the lower part of the market. Here, consumers were happy to spend money for a more limited experience, more in common with a media player than a PC. As several Chinese players entered the space, tier one players defected, leaving Apple to control the most valuable part of the market.

The longevity of the tablet category seems to depend on tablets establishing themselves as PCs, thus coming full circle from the very device they wanted to differentiate themselves from. Right off the bat, tablets replicated our smartphone experience, giving us the apps we know and love, optimized for a larger screen, larger batteries and more powerful processors.

As smartphones grew in both size and power, there was little differentiation left to be delivered. Failing to find their place between the smartphone and the PC, tablets had to try and replace one of these devices, and as no consumer in their right mind would give up their smartphone, the PC became the obvious target. Vendors are soldiering on in this space either by making devices look like a tablet and masquerading as 2-in-1s or trying to position them as the next computing platform.

Smartwatches have no point of reference

Wearables, like tablets, are struggling to become a must-have for consumers. As it was for tablets, the market is polarizing toward the lower end, where fitness bands offer a limited focus, simpler value proposition and, most importantly, more affordable price points.

The route to success for vendors will have to be very different, as smartwatches will not benefit from going full circle to either of the products they sprung from in analog watches and smartphones.

Tablets had a much easier starting point than wearables. Replicating what smartphones could do was relatively simple, and although many consumers remain to be convinced, the value proposition was clear.

For wearables, it was much harder. Early fitness bands have not become a mass-market gadget, which makes understanding how a very personal device like a smartwatch could appeal to a very diverse group of people quite difficult. The combination of always-on and a small screen requires information to be displayed uniquely, both in layout and prioritization. This calls for user interfaces and applications to be rethought. Apple, which generally does not enter a market that’s still in its infancy, understood there was a need to learn directly from users with real-life experience. The improvements to Apple Watch UI, as well as the refocus around health, are direct learnings from that first market seeding.

With an improved GPU on Apple Watch series 2 and series 1, we are also seeing new dedicated apps better catering to the use case, rather than being a replica of the phone app.

Personal means finding different hooks

Fitness and health in the wider sense will offer little opportunity to devices in the high end. This is because, for most consumers, fitness and health translates to simple measures such as steps and calories, and these can be delivered by devices that cost a fraction of what smartwatches cost.

Adding value to these categories requires some degree of evangelizing by vendors. Apple has gone quickly down this path by showing active calories, a comprehensive list of workouts, stands and, more recently, breathing. Gamification of health and fitness will appeal to some users, while ties into online coaching services or health insurance rewards might add value for others. Creating an ecosystem that adds value — and has the user think such value comes from the device they are wearing — is key.

However, the difficulty of wearables is the very personal nature of the device. Not all users find the same value from the same features. With smartphones, it was easy. No matter what apps we had on them, we all did one thing: Make calls. Outside of health and fitness, there are other areas where I see an opportunity to hook consumers with wearables:

Payments: Much more convenient than taking your phone out of your pocket.

Authentication: Today, it might be unlocking your Mac or your phone. Tomorrow, it could be your home or any of the smart devices in your home or office.

Decluttering inbound information: If used properly, a smartwatch can help you declutter your information flow by letting you see only what matters to you when it matters to you. Setting up what social media, emails, text messages get to you allows you to stay more in control without getting overwhelmed by being connected anywhere anytime.

Reclaiming your time: By allowing you to see what matters, smartwatches also help you decide what needs attention straightaway or can be deferred. Admit it — when you see a text or an email, often it does not require you to act on it immediately. If you just read messages on your phone, you feel compelled to reply, and once you are on your phone, you might as well check Twitter or Facebook or read that other email that arrived earlier.

Most of the examples I outlined here speak more to a user who is technologically very engaged than a mainstream user. This is not the same as an early adopter who often also has a larger disposable income. Technologically engaged users who have multiple devices, are engaged with apps and spend most of their time connected will see the appeal of smartwatches when properly positioned, but might not see the value at the top of the price range. Apple’s move to update the GPU in the Apple Watch Series 1 while selling it at a lower price speaks to this point exactly.

Where does this leave Android Wear?

Frankly, this leaves Android Wear with a lot of work to be done. It seems to me that not much was learned from the tablet market, poor dedicated app ecosystem, lack of software differentiation and market guidance for the vendors. The slow software update cycle, as well as the limited improvements, clearly point to a Google that has bigger fish to fry at the moment, and it is unwilling to invest in a market that has yet to prove itself. Or — and I hope this is more the case — to an Android Wear team that is regrouping to figure out how to deliver true value.

Wearables could turn out to be important assets in both the connected home and AI battles. So, while hardware might never give vendors the sales volumes they were hoping for, it might give them yet another access point to highly valuable users which, in the long run, will prove an incredible investment. Apple knows this and continues to invest in the space. Sales results from Watch Series 2 might convince others there is more to wearables than a race to the bottom.

Carolina Milanesi is a principal analyst at Creative Strategies Inc. She focuses on consumer tech across the board; from hardware to services she analyzes today to help predict and shape tomorrow. In her prior role as chief of research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Milanesi drove thought leadership research; before that, she spent 14 years at Gartner, most recently as VP of consumer devices research and agenda manager. Reach her at @caro_milanesi.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

The iPhone is such a big part of Apple’s revenue that we have seen a lot of coverage and attention paid post-launch event to iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. While Apple Watch is nowhere near iPhone revenue yet, it deserves our attention because of the role it will play in Apple’s future.

Early adopters’ learnings

When Apple originally introduced Apple Watch, it focused on design/style, communication, and fitness. While design made Apple Watch stand out from the competition, I think it is fair to say it captured more tech adopters than it did jewelry buyers and fashionistas.

Communication was about two main things: Notifications and digital touch. Notifications ended up being a strong driver of satisfaction, but not necessarily of purchase. This is because it is quite hard to articulate how notifications can impact your phone usage and the value they bring to you. This is a feature that delivers different returns to different people that will be discovered as they use Apple Watch. For some, it is about being in control. For others, it is about being in the moment. For others, it is about never missing what is most important. Precisely because it is so personal, it’s quite hard to pitch it to potential buyers, especially as many see their phone playing the exact same roles.

Digital touch was an attempt to broaden the way we communicate by adding more of a personal touch from a device that is the only one consumers see as more personal than their phone. However, the limited number of users that early adopters could interact with, coupled with the fact that, more likely than not, the people they wanted to interact with might not have had a Watch, a spouse or a child, limited the appeal.

When all is said and done, fitness remains the strongest purchase driver for wearable buyers at the moment, especially as we expand beyond early adopters.

Doubling down on fitness is not a change in focus

Wearables are not a must-have. I have been saying this since the very beginning of the market. This means that consumers need to be convinced to invest in them. From the beginning, fitness has been what resonates with them, because it is the obvious use case, compared to what could be done with smartphones.

Some 77 percent of American consumers we interviewed in the spring said they bought a wearable device because of the step-counting feature. Another 38 percent said they wanted a heart-rate monitor and 36 percent wanted a sleep tracker.

By adding GPS and a swim-proof design to Watch Series 2, combined with an improved CPU GPU and a brighter display, Apple provides a solid upgrade for current Watch owners, as well as a more attractive proposition for users who are either looking at upgrading from a fitness band or are wearing a smart device on their wrist for the first time, especially given the $369 starting price.

With fitness at the center of Apple Watch’s line up, having a Sport edition no longer made sense. But adding a trusted sport brand like Nike to the portfolio makes a lot of sense, particularly as the price of the entry-level Watch now starts at $20 more than the Sport edition did. As Apple did with the activity and workout features, with Watch Nike+, it tries to appeal to both serious and occasional runners with dedicated workouts. Apple’s gamification effort, which started with the badges users could earn, increases with watchOS 3 as users can now create groups they share, compare and challenge in their achievements.

While I am not a fan (mainly because I hate public shaming), the social aspect is certainly more rewarding for some than any badge of honor Apple could ever give them. The activity rings can also now be more central to Apple Watch, with some new faces that display the information in a more effective way for users who really want to stay focused on their daily goal.

There is luxury and then there is luxury

Apple Watch buyers certainly appreciated the design, the quality of material and the overall look and feel of the product. While they might have bought Apple Watch instead of another smartwatch based on looks, I am not sure many bought it thinking they were buying a piece of jewelry. As is the case in the traditional watch market that Apple now measures itself against, there are different kinds of high-end watches. Apple repositioned its luxury threshold, going from the Gold Edition priced at $10,000, to the ceramic edition priced at $1,249. From an addressable market perspective, there is certainly a bigger segment for the ceramic edition than there was for the gold, especially as Apple is still working on establishing a more comprehensive brand status that includes more than just tech.

Hardware only tells half the story

Most of the learnings from the first Apple Watch release are best demonstrated by how the UI has morphed. As for the marketing messaging, Apple only tweaked what it had initially delivered with watchOS to improve the experience and widen the appeal.

Digital touch has now been integrated as an option to respond to messages in the same way it has been added to messages in iOS. It might just be me, but even the way scribble and digital touch have been added to iOS links nicely to the Watch, helping to socialise this way to express ourselves as well as widen the circle of people who can now receive and send heartbeats or kisses or fireballs or even a heartbreak. It sure is something my 8-year-old has happily embraced on her iPad.

Swiping — now part of our muscle memory, thanks to iPhone and iPad — also plays a more proactive role in watchOS 3 as it is the case for the revamped launch screen. Force Touch is still there, but is not highlighted — the same as for iOS.

After using Apple Watch Series 2 for over a week, it is the speed and the improved battery life I came to appreciate. While I have been waiting to be able to swim with Apple Watch (I wish it was available when I went on holiday), it’s the speed and battery life that positively impact my daily experience. The new GPU and CPU make a great deal of difference when launching apps and interacting with Watch. Apple built it and now I hope apps will come.

This is still what I hope to see now that developers can no longer use the excuse of a sluggish OS that did not allow them to design Watch apps. Apple tried to kick things off with Breathe, an app that aims to show that there is more to health than calories and steps. While I am still getting used to it, and have it set for every three hours rather than every hour, I find that between “stand” and “breathe,” I am more conscious of how long I sit and how caught up into things I get, and these help me take a moment.

With developers more likely to be waiting for a broader addressable market, I think we will see sales pick up, thanks to the lower-priced but upgraded experience of Watch Series 1 now at $269, and the broader appeal of GPS and swim mode in Series 2.

Carolina Milanesi is a principal analyst at Creative Strategies Inc. She focuses on consumer tech across the board; from hardware to services she analyzes today to help predict and shape tomorrow. In her prior role as chief of research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Milanesi drove thought leadership research; before that, she spent 14 years at Gartner, most recently as VP of consumer devices research and agenda manager. Reach her at @caro_milanesi.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.