When he first thought of what would become the Pebble smart watch five years ago, as an industrial-design student at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, Eric Migicovsky wanted a way to use his smart phone while on his bicycle so he created a prototype in his dorm. “I thought of creating a watch that could grab information from my phone’’. Now Migicovsky is giving out 85,000 Pebble watches to eager customers who don’t want to carry around a glass slab out of their pocket just to check their e-mail or the weather forecast. Pebble uses Bluetooth to connect wirelessly to an iPhone or Android phone and displays notifications, messages, and other simple data of the user’s choosing on its small black-and-white LCD screen. In April 2012, using the online fund-raising platform Kick starter, Migicovsky asked for $100,000 to help bring Pebble to market.
The expensive pebble watch can be used to control a music playlist or run simple applications, Migicovsky and his team purposely designed the watch to do as little as possible, leaving more complicated apps for phones. The black-and-white screen, for example, can be read in direct sunlight and displays content persistently without needing to “sleep” to conserve battery power, as color or touch-screen displays do. These watches are coming to market a few months before Google Glass. Wearable computing manufacturers have produced consumers with mostly incomplete product offerings In addition, there are literally dozens of smartwatches, currently in development, that are supposed to be released by the end of the year, including smartwatch offerings from electronics and computing powerhouses such as Apple, Google, and Samsung.
“Smart watches will be the most important new product category in electronics since the iPad,” said Chris Jones, Canalys vice president and principal analyst. “Software platforms tied to smart watches will also be a tremendous opportunity for developers to write apps in categories such as health and wellness or sports and fitness.” Canalys said “hardware design will be critical for smart watches, as consumers will only want to wear fashionable products”. The businesses predicted market for traditional watches will quickly be disrupted once consumers determine that smart watches add sufficiently valuable functionality to their lives while being “stylish enough.” Canalys estimates that more than a billion watches were shipped in 2012.
Works cited:
1. http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/513376/smart-watches/
2. http://www.smartwatchnews.org/top-5-smart-watches/
3. http://business.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=0110010KYOVW