One third of consumers interested in buying an Apple iWatch

With reports that Apple has a team of 100 people working on a smart watch, and a new Apple patent application describing a computer with a flexible display that could wrap around the wrist, the rumoured iWatch has been hitting the headlines regularly since the beginning of the year.

We asked our readers whether they would buy an Apple smart watch, and a third of the 896 respondents said that they would.

A total of 17.4 per cent said that they don’t believe Apple is making an iWatch. These readers are not alone in that opinion, with a recent report even suggesting the name ‘iWatch’ could actually be for an upcoming Apple television set.

With the largest number of votes, 44 per cent of respondents said that they don’t need a smart watch. Macworld forum user ‘fingerpost’ said: “Personally, I haven’t worn a watch since I decided to start carrying a mobile phone.”

“I think the biggest problem would be battery life,” wrote Macworld forum user Dragonfly. “Nobody would want to charge their watch every evening or want to look down at the time to see that the battery is dead. As long as Apple got over that problem, it wasn’t chunky, didn’t cost more than £300, and looked classy with some useful purposes such as telling me when my iPhone is ringing or when emails arrive, then I’d consider it.”

SEE: Apple iWatch release date, rumours and leaked images

Three per cent of the respondents to our survey said that they consider their old iPod nano an iWatch, using the watch-face feature and a wrist strap to turn Apple’s media player into a smart watch-like device. iPod nano owners can use products such as the iWatchz Carbon to achieve this.

The remaining respondents said that they already own a smart watch, with the most popular being the Pebble.

Pebble, which started life on crowd-funding site Kickstarter where it raised a record-breaking $10 million, is a watch that can connect to iPhone and Android smartphones using Bluetooth, to alert users to incoming calls, emails and messages. There are also many downloadable watchfaces and internet-connected apps that users can install on their Pebble.

SEE: Apple’s iWatch doesn’t scare smart watch makers Pebble, MetaWatch

Of course, there has been no official word from Apple about whether an iWatch is in the works, but co-founder of the company Steve Wozniak has said that he would welcome such device.