If it feels like the promise of an Apple smartwatch has been looming forever, that’s because it has. And its shadow helped birth the army of other smartwatches that we have today. But now, finally, the near mythical iWatch is rumoured to arrive very soon. Here’s what we think we know.
What’s it called?
Colloquially, Apple’s upcoming watch has been referred to as an iWatch, though there’s not evidence that this might be its name outside of it following Apple naming conventions. Information about the size of its screen and the bevy of health features it will include suggest it might be actually be more of a “health bangle” anyway. Apple has acquired the trademark to “iWatch” in a number of countries, though that’s pretty soft evidence.
Apple has filed patents for a wearable device with swappable screen modules that makes a reference to something called iTime, so that’s a possibility as well, though Apple would probably be wiser than to blow the real name in a patent. http://gizmodo.com/itime-smartwat…
For our purposes, we’re going to keep calling it the iWatch and hope that Apple has something more clever up its, er, sleeve.
Design
One of the big (rumoured) differentiators for the iWatch is design. That is to say, the iWatch is supposed to look good, unlike most of the other, grosser-looking options that are available right now. (Excluding the Pebble Steel and the Moto 360, of course.)
Evidence of this is backed up by a number of hires that Apple has made in the past few years. Hires like former CEO of Yves Saint Laurent Paul Deneve and Senior VP of Retail Angela Ahrendts, who helped revitalize Burberry as CEO without abandoning its heritage. We’re talking legit fashion people, as opposed to tech people with an eye for pretty things.
What will all those expensive salaries come up with though? That’s a much bigger question. We’ve seen concepts leftandright, and although some of them look nice, none of them quite has that Apple flair. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a lot of information on what the iWatch will look like. No physical leaks of any sort. In a broader sense that iTime might offer some clues, as it shows a watch-type band with modules that can snap in and out. It’s similar to the WIMM One from WIMM Labs, a recent Google acquisition.
These sketches are broad, though, as patent sketches are, and it’s meant to cover functionality not design, so it’s of little help. Not to mention that patents aren’t necessarily indicative of actual products; companies patent things all the time with no intention of ever actually making them. A slightly more substantial and interesting pair of reports came from Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, suggesting respectively that the iWatch could have a 2.5-inch screen, and that it might come in different sizes.
A 2.5-inch screen for a traditionally-shaped watch is nuts. The clunky Galaxy Gear clocked in at a mere 1.63-inches. So if the 2.5 inch screen rumour is true, it suggests something either more like a curved bracelet, or a giant hunk of Apple on your wrist. What does seem like a sure thing is that the iWatch will have an unscratchable sapphire glass watchface, due to recent evidence that Apple is producing “jewelry-grade” slices of the stuff. But other than that, the options are still pretty excitingly open.
Specs and features
The iWatch will undoubtedly do all your standard smartwatch things, like show notifications and other handy data on your wrist. You’ve already seen that in Android Wear. But assorted rumours, as well as a number of hires over the past year or so, suggest that iWatch’s big differentiator is going to be fitness and health. Apple’s recent announcement of somewhat precedented if also extravagant) guts it would take to accomplish accurate step-tracking, sleep-tracking (Apple has a sleep specialist on staff), golf-swing-tracking, etc. And when it comes to fitness tracking, it’s worth noting that Tim Cook is a big fan of the FuelBand and sits on Nike’s board. Then there’s the part where Nike seems to have jettisoned its whole FuelBand team. Maybe to go in on something with Apple? Who knows.
But the iWatch will likely go beyond “fitness” and on into straight-up “health.” The WSJ reports that the iWatch has no less than 10 different sensors. What those might be isn’t known, but possibilities include things like a (high quality!) heart rate monitor; Apple hired the Chief Medical Officer at a company that made a pulse-tracking iPhone app. It could even get as serious as blood sugar measurement, as Apple picked up a few medical researchers with experience making devices that read glucose levels by looking at sweat. Not to mention that Cupertino’s health monitoring ambitions are probably serious, considering high-level Apple officials have recently been chatting with the FDA.
As for hardware specs — battery life, chipset, charging method, screen resolution — we’re pretty up in the air. No hard specs have leaked, though it’s reasonable to assume that the iWatch will rock an Apple chip (duh), something involving the M7 or its successor.
Hopefully the battery life will be in the neighbourhood of “long as hell” considering that a ~1 day life is a problem nearly all current smartwatches deal with. Wireless charging would also be a smart move, just for ease of charging and the ability to eliminate an unsightly port, though Apple’s shown no real interest in wirelessly charging gadgets before.
Price
Probably expensive. There have been no particularly strong leaks on pricing, though analysts have thrown around a $US300 figure (which does not mean a whole lot). Currently, the smartwatch market is filled with offerings hovering around $US200, with “luxury”-type watches like the Pebble Steel and the