Apple iWatch: Coming soon, runs iOS, to earn mucho mazuma Reminiscent of the hypegasm that preceded the releases of the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010, rumors of Apple's impending "iWatch" are flooding the intertubes, with the latest being that it will be released this year, will run iOS, and will rake in gobs and gobs of cash for a company that has seen its stock take a relentless …
Well, it will depend if companies like GP, Cartier, IWC have the lawyers to defend themselves against the IP lawsuits for stealing the invention of " a portable device, in a removable way attached to a limb or other body part, serving the purpose of displaying curtailed information of or about one or more types of data".
Get your Rolex now, it might be outlawed next year.
As a Pebble owner, I have to say that right now, Pebble isn't quite living up to its promise, since the SDK has not yet shipped. The Pebble will still give you the alerts from your phone, but much of what was promised is not yet available.
So it is a bit of a horse race between when Pebble will ship the SDK, and Apple will ship their device.
That said: right now, all the promise for the iWatch are about like the Dilbert cartoon (http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-12-13/?Page=2): "And our product has a thirty terabit RAM cache [...] and it is capable of detecting tachion [sic] field emissions [....]".
See also the iPhone, and the iPad. Though they might have got ideas from many other products, whether they were superior in vision, execution or marketing, they became the products every other was compared to.
Now, it may be too early to tell, but I have the highest doubts that the iWatch will do the same.
I guess if you live in a country that is enveloped in perpetual gloom, then an OLED or LCD watch might be viable.
Here in Australia, mobile phone displays are invisible in bright sunlight, and I can't imagine that a watch with the same property would be very popular. Also, there is not much room in a watch for a large battery, so the only display that makes any kind of sense is electronic paper technology (as used in e-book readers), which are visible in bright sunlight, and draw very little current.
In addition, there is no need for a watch to do any more that drive a display, accept user inputs, and communicate with a remote processor. That can be done with a tiny 8 bit micro controller that draws very little current, and doesn't even need a scheduler, let alone a full blown operating system. The job could be done with not much more RAM than is required to buffer the (monochrome) display image, and in theory doesn't even require a scheduler. The suggestion that a full blown operating system should be included is absurd.
Interestingly, it will share a trait that mechanical watches have - when the battery goes flat, it will only show the correct time twice a day.
A small colour e-ink display should be easy enough to manufacture, maybe with a limited colour set. The relatively low number of pixels would give a reasonable frame refresh rate for information display. They might even be able to adequately display the moving second-hand of a clock so that you could have a continuous time indicator on your wrist. That would be quite an achievement.
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