The fall cat-walk season for mobile devices has started in earnest, with the IFA electronics show ‘ the closest Europe comes to January’s CES extravaganza ‘ kicking off in Berlin, and Apple’s launch set for Tuesday. It must be a sign of the desperation of the smartphone industry, as margins fall and designs commoditize, that the bid to surprise and delight jaded consumers and analysts this year revolves around the ‘smart watch’. Yes, the wearable computing trend has huge future potential to change behavior; create new device and software markets; and deliver growth for those which respond innovatively. But all that will take a decade to evolve ‘ and the smart watch is not, except in the most simplistic sense, the herald of the wearable revolution.
There are actual interesting mobile devices out there at IFA ‘ Sony’s upgraded, waterproof Xperia; Samsung’s enlarged Galaxy Note 3; and many others to come, all sporting the latest technologies in display, processing and apps. But the watches have grabbed the headlines, perhaps because they may herald the next big shift in how users communicate and compute ‘ having moved from static to mobile activity, and from local content to the web, now they will embrace wearable gadgets, making devices that sit separately from the body old hat.
That trend is genuinely interesting, but ‘ outside of specialized applications such as medical monitoring – it will take a long time for it to be more than a hobbyist activity focused on a few experimental items like glasses. The day when we wear our computers as automatically as we now put a handset in our pockets is far away, as is the massive uptick in revenues that will bring for the right component and gadget makers.
And even then, the watch is not the herald of the wearable revolution. Apart from being on the wrist rather than in a bag or jacket, it is nothing new. Microsoft, LG and others have been trying, and failing, to sell smart watches for a decade. The versions which have attracted some real enthusiasm have been realistic about their role ‘ the crowdsourced Pebble or the Nike fitness bands, for instance. They are not phones or computers, instead they do what wrist watches have always done ‘ provide alerts about those rare items that a user might need on a very regular basis (the time of day, for instance), in a handy and easily visible location (the wrist). Adding calendar or message alerts to the watch’s traditional functions is handy, allowing you to check these items as surreptitiously as the time, when in a meeting.
But the smart watch is not a wearable computer, nor will it revolutionize either users’ habits or the fortunes of device makers. Samsung is testing the waters with its Galaxy Gear ‘ it can afford to experiment with an unproven form factor in the interests of claiming early mover advantage for its expanding Galaxy brand.
Along with Sony’s SmartWatch (about to go into its second generation and positioned as a second screen for Xperia handsets), and the potential ‘iWatch’, the Gear is sure to have a flurry of sales to gadget lovers looking for the next novelty, or desperate Christmas present hunters. That flurry will stoke even more overblown predictions that the watch is the ‘next big thing’, but the devices will not expand easily beyond the hobbyists, and to gain share, they will have to be extremely cheap ‘ far cheaper than the $299 Samsung is charging for Gear – so will hardly transform the businesses of the OEMs.
For Samsung, accessories make perfect sense. They extend the powerful Galaxy brand and, since the Gear requires a Galaxy smartphone to be connected, they may help a customer opt for a Samsung Android handset over an alternative during the coming holiday season. But it’s no more revolutionary than that.
The Gear sports a 1.63-inch OLED screen with trademark Samsung brightness, plus a 1.9-megapixel camera, which can take photos if the user swipes the display. A microphone and speaker are embedded in the strap, so the watch can be used to make calls ‘ differentiating it from the fitness-oriented wrist computers ‘ though it needs the handset to connect to the cellular network. It also supports Samsung’s voice activated technology, similar to Apple Siri; and incorporates a fitness tracker, 4Gbytes of internal memory and 512Mbytes of RAM. It comes in six colors and will be launched with typical Samsung scale ‘ in 140 countries, starting next month in the US and Japan.
The vendor is building a base of applications which expand the functionality of the watch, which has an Android OS, and already has about 70 apps.
Shin Jong Kyun, head of the mobile business, unveiled the gadget in a flashy launch in Berlin, sparking optimistic forecasts ‘ Strategy Analytics thinks the Korean giant will shift half a million Gears this year, on the basis that consumers will see the devices as highly personal and a cool product they can easily show off to friends. That, of course, will require something Samsung certainly has ‘ a huge marketing budget.
While many expect Apple to debut an iWatch along with the new iPhone next week ‘ and anticipate that this model will be the real catalyst for this segment ‘ another smart watch has appeared from a less likely source, Qualcomm. The chip giant has unveiled Toq, which is not designed to propel the company into the device mass market, but to showcase some of its favorite internal developments, such as the AllJoyn media framework and Mirasol display.
Mirasol, an ultra-low power MEMS-based display which harnesses ambient light, was officially cancelled last year but then got a new lease of life when Qualcomm acquired MEMS screen innovator Pixtronix, and announced an alliance with Sharp, which could expand manufacturing capability for the products. One of the Mirasol’s challenges was always to scale up to screen sizes over four inches or so ‘ but of course, that makes it perfectly positioned for the supposed smartwatch explosion.
Unveiled at this week’s Qualcomm Uplinq conference (more analysis on that in next week’s Wireless Watch), Toq (pronounced ‘talk’) showcases Mirasol, whose low power consumption makes an always-on display practicable, and the device also sports Qualcomm’s WiPower LE wireless charging technology and stereo Bluetooth audio.
The limited edition Android 4.0.3 product, which like its more commercial peers is positioned as a second screen for a handset, also shows off the AllJoyn framework, which will enable developers to create apps for the watch, and add wrist-based notifications to their mobile software (AllJoyn features a Notification Services Framework). Many of Qualcomm’s activities in new form factors and wearable devices are focused on sectors like healthcare rather than consumer gadgetry and it has R&D projects in more futuristic aspects of wearables, including body area networks with sensors that are constantly attached or even embedded, for purposes such as medical monitoring. Toq will be integrated soon with the 2Net platform, recently announced by the Qualcomm Life division which focuses on the health management area.
As a showcase for Qualcomm’s Bluetooth technology, Toq will also come in a ‘premium audio edition’ featuring ‘the first truly wireless stereo headphones’, with no wires needed either for listening or recharging.
“Toq’s always-on, always-connected, always-visible wearable technology gives you a ‘digital sixth sense’, telling you what you need to know, when you need to know it, with just a glance at your wrist or a whisper in your ear. Toq is a showcase for the benefits of the Mirasol display, WiPower LE and stereo Bluetooth technologies and highlights the experience that the wearable category can provide,” said CEO Paul Jacobs. “Toq not only represents a long history of technological innovation for Qualcomm, but it also demonstrates our commitment to delivering the breakthrough technologies that redefine the ways we interact with each other and the world around us.”
Other component providers are eyeing the wearable opportunity, from glasses to smart watches to future ‘connected clothing’, in the hope of a boom for certain product groups.
Connectivity will need to work at ultra-low power levels of course. Broadcom recently introduced its WICED (Wireless Internet Connectivity for Embedded Devices) Direct platform, which users the Wi-Fi Direct standard. This allows for peer-to-peer connections without an access point and is suited to low power wearable devices such as fitness monitors and watches, allowing them to communicate via a handset. Broadcom has already showcased some prototype products for the internet of things, such as a Bluetooth cooking thermometer and a button-sized sensor for incorporation in a garment.
Sensor vendors will be another category looking to cash in on wearables. Sony is considering applying its existing image sensors to these products as a hedge against slowdown in smartphone demand for these components.
The chips, whose main targets are handsets and digital cameras, many in Sony’s own devices business, could be broadened to wearable computers, medical equipment and self-driving cars, said Yasuhiro Ueda, SVP for the Japanese firm’s image sensor unit, talking to Bloomberg.
Sony has almost one-third of the $7.6bn market for the low power CMOS technology and supplies Apple and Samsung as well as its own divisions. ‘We have a high sense of crisis after seeing the high end smartphone market start to saturate this year,’ Ueda said. ‘Our plan is to draw a growth strategy in an area where we see shipment potential of 10bn units a year.’ He added: ‘Image sensors will be crucial devices for wearable computers’ such as smart watches.
Of course, as we have specialized graphics processing units (GPUs) and image processing units (IPUs), and so on, so there will be dedicated wearable processing units (WPUs). Indian start-up Ineda Systems – whose board is chaired by former Motorola Mobility CEO and Qualcomm COO Sanjay Jha ‘ has developed such a chip, based on PowerVR graphics cores and MIPS CPU cores. This low power SoC will be targeted at wearable applications like watches and health monitors and the firm is trying to build an ecosystem by publishing a range of APIs and a development framework.
As well as Jha, the board includes Cadence Design CEO Lip Bu-Tan and Krishna Yarlagadda, president of Imagination Technologies. Ineda claims to have an innovative system architecture working in FPGA prototype form, which can improve power/performance by an order of magnitude.