Two more interesting smartwatch designs are surfacing
HP and Casio are each premiering a smartwatch that, like Swatch’s and Tissot’s idea, are different from the pack. One of these is a something that would be kept as a dress watch to wear when you are going out while the other one can identify those tunes playing on the radio or background-music setup while you are out and about.
Articles
HP’s luxury dress smartwatch
Take a look at HP’s luxury smartwatch | Engadget
HP, Gilt and designer Michael Bastion teaming up for a smartwatch | Android Authority
From the horse’s mouth
Gilt
Casio’s G-Watch that identifies music
Casio’s Next G-Watch Uses SoundHound To Discover New Music | Engadget
Casio’s Latest Bluetooth Watch Puts Song Recognition On Your Wrist | Gizmodo
My Comments
The first of the watches is a luxury fashionable dress watch that is engineered by HP but designed by Gilt along with the fashion designer, Michael Bastian. This men’s watch has a round 44mm stainless-steel case and swappable leather bands, taking with it the “stylish yet cool” interior designs associated with some of the recent luxury cars out there.
For functionality, this is meant to interlink with iOS and Android devices using a platform-specific device, this courting the luxury market’s penchant for preferring the Apple iPhones as their smartphone options. At the moment, this watch offers notification functionality for email, text and calls along with being a control surface for music playback and some other apps.
Personally I would see the HP watch’s emphasis on style rather than geekiness more about either the watch to wear when you are going to the Melbourne Club or wanting to take out someone whom you are really trying to impress.
The second of these watches is Casio’s latest G-Shock smartwatch. This has notification functionality through its LCD display which exists behind the traditional clock face and also acts as a control surface for your phone, especially with your music using a knob on the edge of the bezel. It would work alongside a Casio-supplied platform-specific app for your smartphone and maintains the rugged look of other G-Shock watches.
But it also works along with SoundHound and an internal microphone to identify the music that is playing. Once identified, the song details appear on the watch’s LCD display.
The Casio watch would be on a par with other Android Wear smartwatches but has a long battery life thus avoiding the need for you to charge it every night. It would look the part more as a utility watch for everyday activities.
At the moment, these watches along with the previously covered Swatch watches come across more as baseline “control and display surfaces” that link to your smartphone using Bluetooth 4.0 LE a.k.a. Bluetooth Smart. But they would require the use of different apps to provide the software connection. Personally, what Google, Apple and Microsoft should work on is a baseline wearable specification which allows different wearable devices offering baseline functionality to link to the phone without the need to run many extra apps. As well, the watches should at least support using the phone as a “reference clock” for setting the time and adjusting for different time zones and daylight-savings time.
What is happening is that there are smartwatches that place less emphasis on the “geek nature” and could expose this genre of product to most of us.
