In the wake of the Pebble's shipment to early adopters, Apple is tossing around the idea of a watch with smartphone capabilities, preparing to burst into a market currently dominated by fitness devices.
The New York Times and Washington Post both received tips from people who preferred to remain off-the-record. Two anonymous sources say that the iWatch would run iOS, and that Apple is experimenting with curved glass. The company has partnered before with Nike on the FuelBand and shoes that connect to your iPod, but this device has already stirred the NYTimes and Washington Post into a furor of speculation.
The Times is tapping into its fanciful side, recalling the age of Dick Tracy, James Bond and Inspector Gadget in their respective heydays. Will it have Siri? What about maps? Can it receive text messages or monitor a user's activity? (Impractical, but useful in a pinch: what about web browsing? Would you have to purchase a data plan so it can be used individually, or would you have to hook it up to another iDevice?)
Apple products have numerous accessories already that take advantage of its functions, but an official iWatch would be a boon to the company, especially if it's cheaper than an iPhone. "This makes Apple potentially the biggest player of the wearables market in a sort of invisible way." Sarah Rotman Epps, a specialist in wearable computing, told the NY Times.
Ars Technica speculates that the new device could use Corning Glass's new Willow Glass, which is 100 microns thick (about the thickness of a piece of paper), and can be rolled into a cylinder about 2 inches wide. It also reportedly works very well with touch sensors.
Pete Bocko, chief technology officer for Corning, told the Times that if he tried to make a curved-glass smartwatch, he would use Willow Glass though he stressed that our understanding of the human body and is still fairly limited, as it can be unpredictable.
Last year, a Chinese gadget site, Tech.163, reported that Apple had started development of a watch that would feature bluetooth and a 1.5-inch display, but Apple isn't the only company working on wearable computers. For example, the Pebble can attach to both Android and iOS devices, can run apps, and uses E-Paper.
Google is designing the Google Glasses, a wearable monitor that sits above the eye (though it doesn't, disappointingly, look anything like the scouters from Dragonball). The company hopes that by 2015, the glasses would constitute 3 percent of its revenue. Olympus is also working on wearable computers.
