Apple smartwatch

Four 'Apple smartwatch' stories July 2013 - August 2014

Apple and Samsung will sew-up the smartwatch market, others will fail, predicts analyst

Ben Lovejoy Aug 14 2014 - 5:41 am PT

iwatch-concept-future-08

Apple and Samsung will largely own the smartwatch market between them, predicts Jackdaw Research chief analyst Jan Dawson in a report being issued later today and seen by Re/code.

Dawson said that new players should “stay out of the market,” and existing players should scale back their plans.

“We do not recommend that existing vendors should maintain current levels of investment when market growth and the overall revenue opportunity remain poor,” Dawson said. “It is unlikely that more than one or two small vendors will be able to make a sustainable business out of smartwatches in the face of competition from Samsung and […] Apple” …

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The research that shows Apple is right to take its time over the iWatch

Ben Lovejoy Apr 2 2014 - 6:25 am PT

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wearables

New research from Endeavour shows that more than half of U.S. consumers who have owned a wearable device no longer use it, and of those two-thirds stopped using it within the first six months of ownership. This is up from the 40 percent abandonment found by a similar survey by CSS Insight last fall.

The Guardian newspaper in the UK has a supporting piece in which it found more than 900 Galaxy Gear watches for sale on eBay, with asking prices as low as a third of the purchase cost.

While the data may be bad news for existing smartwatch and fitness band suppliers, The Guardian has an apposite comparison with early mp3 players, which also suffered high abandonment rates a decade ago.

So lots of those early MP3 players eventually ended up in drawers; but that didn’t stop the sector becoming huge.

And the company responsible for that shift was, of course, Apple: the company which took its time getting both the device and the user-interface right.

Apple working to slim its iWatch via intermittent Bluetooth LE connection?

Ben Lovejoy Nov 7 2013 - 4:31 am PT

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iWatch concept by Stephen Olmstead

An Apple patent filing filed today suggests that Apple may be working on a way to make its long-rumored iWatch slimmer than existing offerings by reducing the size of the battery required.

One of the barriers to widespread adoption of smartwatches is that existing models are not exactly sleek. Technology lovers might be willing to put function ahead of form and put up with chunky devices, but the wider market buys on style first, technology second.

While the Bluetooth LE protocol used by existing smartwatches uses around half the power of classic Bluetooth (peaking at 15mA instead of 30mA), a constant connection in a device you won’t want to charge daily still requires a reasonably chunky battery. What Apple’s patent proposes is for an on-demand creation of a Bluetooth connection between two devices, one with radio capabilities (aka an iPhone), one without …
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A look at some flexible batteries that could power iWatch [video]

Ben Lovejoy Jul 16 2013 - 5:23 am PT

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Shortly after an Apple patent for a flexible battery design suitable for the rumored iWatch was published, German site MobileGeeks has shown off a real-life example of a fully-flexible, watchstrap-sized battery from Taiwanese company ProLogium.

Flexible Printed Circuits (FCP), where components are mounted on a bendable plastic substrate, have existed for several years, but until recently the batteries were the stumbling block. The patent shown by Apple still appeared to show rigid batteries mounted on an FCP. FCP Ceramic Lithium Batteries are the latest version of this technology, allowing the batteries themselves to be flexible. A quick video look after the break:

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