Not power hungry for a phone but for a watch it's a dog. Recharge a watch twice a day, how is that "not THAT power hungry"?
A watch needs an order of magnitude less CPU power than a phone, perhaps several. In 2014 if you see a watch product with a smartphone CPU, you know they blew it.
You mean it /should/ use an order of magnitude less CPU power, but ATM that's not the case - smartwatches seem more like a previous generation of smartphones sized downwards, with a patched OS.
I don´t know if it makes much sense comparing a smartwatch with a traditional watch.
They share only the form factor. I would go as far as saying they do not even share the functionality of keeping track of time: nowadays traditional watches are basically used only as fashion accessories (as the article points out), since for most people that function has been carried out by mobile phones since the first Nokias.
A Smartwatch is more like a lightweight (in every sense) smartphone, with the significant drawback of having much less space available for a battery, but I agree completely that having to charge it twice a day is a deal breaker, and not acceptable from a user standpoint, regardless of the feat of engineering the watch actually is.
Most of the current crop of smartwatches trying to be lightweight smartphones are all turkeys and have fizzled. Kind of like the early tablets that tried to be computers when the actual product demands a 8-10 hour (work/school day) battery life. Battery life is even more critical with a watch which needs to last at least 16 hours, hopefully quite a bit longer, and you probably want it to keep telling time even if the main battery goes out unless that battery lasts the better part of a week. So the correct way to design a smartwatch is to, as Apple did with the ipad, figure out the device size and computing capabilities backwards from the battery life and then go to market when you're happy with what's possible.
The Pebble, to it's credit, has a Cortex-M microcontroller instead of a smartphone SoC and get's up to a week of battery life.
