Activity

It seems that crowdfunded smartwatches have become popular again, with Vachen and AGENT Smartwatch starting their Kickstarter campaigns and followed by Boddie and Emopulse closely behind. With all the choices in smartwatches today, we the buyer, are spoiled for choice. You’ve got a large variety of features, operating systems and watch designs. So how do we pick the one we want? Perhaps one of them has features you think are really important to you nevertheless, you hate the design or vice versa. Will there be a way to have our cake and eat it?

Perhaps we can learn a bit from what watchmakers have already been doing for a long time. Companies like Tag Heuer, Seiko, Swatch and many more produce a good selection of wristwatch models year after year. On the surface, they will have absolutely nothing in common, some have a stainless steel casing, other are covered in Swarovski crystals, some show the date, others barely have any numbers on them. Looking at night surface reveals similar or even identical clock movements that power these watches. As these movements are make up a complex and intricate network of springs, counterweights and gears, one can understand that watchmakers would want to use a design for as long as possible. It would you need to too long to design a fresh movement for every new design of a watch.

Hence, using modules in watch design is essential to getting models off the designing table to the manufacturing floor as quickly as possible. The fewer movements had a need to cater to a large selection of watches the better it is for the watchmakers.

In a way, this is exactly what Google did with Android along with. Google has generated a usable and flexible operating-system that smart phone makers may take, tweak and ship making use of their hardware. By creating a base OS that may be dispatched to handsets that hold vastly different hardware, Google has had the opportunity to make sure that Android-powered handsets now outnumber the wildly popular Apple iPhone. Now, you may get an Android smart phone in a number of models with different technical specifications and prices that you may choose which hardware fits you best, knowing that the software experience will undoubtedly be mainly similar.

For smartwatches, it has not been the case. For each and every smartwatch out there, you will find a proprietary operating-system that powers it. This means that the user experience is vastly different for every smartwatch model. It also implies that the makers of the smartwatches have to split their efforts and resources into two parts, watch design and OS development. While app development can sometimes be “outsourced” to alternative party developers, the software development kit (SDK) should be created and this takes time and resources as well.

The various smartwatch makers have taken different approaches to handle this. For starters, Pebble has put a lot of effort into the creation of its SDK and has garnered a decent developer community so far and have also partnered popular big-name app developers just like the RunKeeper. However, Pebble doesn’t look all that classy, it might work as a sports watch or could be worn with casual wear, nonetheless it doesn’t really have the appearance to match office wear. What if more was done on the look side of things? Would the software side took a productivity hit? What if they used a pre-made smartwatch OS?

The Agent smartwatch however is trying to juggle either well concurrently. Secret Labs, the creator of the Agent knows electronics and software very well, but are no experts in watch design. So that they partnered with House of Horology, which creates really nice timepieces. Together, they desire to have the ability to tackle the electronics and the look aspects of the smartwatch together. This is definitely commendable and an excellent strategy, but would this mean delays in the production cycle as it takes time to tweak the operating system and functionality. Secret Labs did however utilize the Microsoft.NET Micro Framework as a base for its operating system. Is this the start to using a distributed OS for smartwatches?

What we need is among the established software companies to spearhead this. A small time player might not cut it because few will utilize an OS that may not be around if the company goes under. Apple watch screen detached, shattered or cracked should be produced by Google, Apple or Microsoft, to be able to give weight to the software. It will also provide trust to developers that the OS will be supported for years ahead. These companies are able to utilize their expertise in software development to create an OS which will be in a position to perform under different hardware conditions, maximize battery life while providing usability and functionality, all at exactly the same time looking great on the watch face.