HP's McKinney teases the (non-webOS) connected wristwatch [video] 52
We have heard about the HP/Fossil partnership on a connected wristwatch and it looks like this little nugget of portable tech magic is less fantasy and more reality than we thought, as HP’s CTO Phil McKinney showed it off at HP’s Future of Innovation event.
McKinney showed the web connected watch, which he said was first introduced in 2007, and described it as the central hub of connectivity.
“The concept was that the watch would become the aggregation point for your connectivity, be the point that brings all your devices together rather than having each device operating independently.”
To hear McKinney’s comments for yourself, check out the video after the break and scrub to the 25 minute mark.
Though he did not reveal any details about what devices it would connect with, what precisely it would do for you, or when it would ever hit the market, he hinted at connecting and sharing and being integrated with the entire family of devices.
McKinney said the prototype he was showing was the first generation of an experimental device. He called it “an investigation” into the concept of devices you wear, not just those you carry in your pocket. He said it would be “fully integrated” with the web, though did not elaborate on what exactly that would mean. When you have a smartphone in your pocket notifying you of email, weather, headlines and everything else, what is there left for the watch to handle for you that requires web access?
Source: Youtube; Thanks to Blackhawk5 for the tip!
52 Comments
Hope it becomes a webOS watch, we need it after that amazingly fast and over-speced and over apped IP-2
webos watch would be awesome.. lcd watch with connectivity for notifications, etc..
That would be sweet.
On the other hand, if you have a wristwatch notifying you of email, weather, headlines and everything else, you may not have to pull your phone out of your pocket quite as often as you do now.
You'd only whip out the phone when you actually need to react to a notification or when you need to do something 'proactively', e.g. write a new email or play Angry Birds. Mostly Angry Birds I suppose.
Exactly, hence improving battery life.
now THAT'S innovation.
good call. my wrist device short list non-ordered:
time-date
caller id
sms notifications
email header notifications (far too many coworkers have their BBs set for vibe email notifications and it goes off every freaking minute)
rss (if you are really needy)
speakerphone would be kinda cool
video chat would be James Bond
Oh. It's a smart card on steroids. More accurately I'd say it's a multi-protocol RFID with enough memory to locally cache some personalization data.
Tons of business applications, minimal consumer value at this time.
Oh, and to say it has an operating system would be a bit of a mistake. The last thing I want to do is take my watch off every six hours and put it on a touchstone. That's what most people do these days because they've ditched their wristwatch for a phone.
make it an 'automatic watch' where your arm movements during the course of the day generate the power needed.
A dual Solar-Kinetic watch is/should be possible soon, that would be cool.
well they have both of those already, i know for sure Kinetic watches.
wouldnt it be a matter of programming the power management, if the arm is at rest(look for solar power and use that to charge) or depending on the accelerometer use kinetics to charge.
then depending on a scenario if you are doing some out door activity on a sunny day, running, biking, playing tennis...etc., use which ever source provides the most efficient form of charging
im no engineer, so dont really know how easy it would be implement.
Bulky. And expensive. And pointless.
I'll keep an open mind about the product and HP might pull off something amazing. But if it requires overnight charging or even once a week charging, it's not a wrist watch. It's a sharp spike to a different part of the anatomy.
In the world I envision, I ditch my smart phone entirely. I want a watch, ear piece, tablet combination. The screen on a phone is just too small to really do much for me. I get claustrophobic trying to do real productivity stuff there. I only use it when I don't have a laptop near. I hope to replace my laptop with a tablet soon for most things.
If we can go far enough into the future, I would replace the tablet with a foldable/scrollable pocket sized tablet that expanded to 10 inches when necessary.
If I need a separate phone device, then a veer sized thing would do.
Or, I would add a pair of heads up display sunglasses and spacial gestures
They have a prototype of this! I'll have to dig for it but the downer was the HUGE backpack and large optical digitizer you have to wear (in it current form). It worked though!
I was thinking something like this
http://www.vuzix.com/consumer/products_wrap310.html
But not so bulky, maybe something like my prescription lenses
I guess that doesn't have the spacial gestures though
He says in the video it has a full software stack.
So I think there is enough cpu and memory to get basic things done and then a lot of cloud connectivity for storage and more intense computing.
The face looks analog, but those big honkin' buttons on the side are a bit over kill. I wonder if the screen is digital.
The ipod nano watches all run iOS.
http://iwatchz.com/
They look good, have a touch interface, they look exciting
http://www.cultofmac.com/apple-touchscreen-ipod-nano-does-not-run-ios/57467
My mistake, so it just mimics the look and feel of iOS. It doesn't really live outside of the device as this watch is intended to. So, not a webOS watch per se, but an onboard OS that plays nice with webOS.
What if they took the keyboard of a veer, shrunk the screen, and put it on a wrist band? Photoshop anyone?
My guess is will receive notifications when the WebOs toaster has popped up your toast!
A wristwatch seems to me as an item from the past, something past generations considered an essential gadget. I haven't worn one for 10 years.
I don't wear one either, but I might if it meant I could leave my phone at home.
Funny you mention that. I wear one but have come to realize that I don't actually use it. I've caught myself on numerous occasions pulling out my phone when someone asked me what time it was. Strange.
Not the current idea of a watch per se but a modern iteration of a device on your wrist that access and controls your devices. (in any city today you can almost look up and see the time displayed almost everywhere)
It might not be essential but it gives a person "style". I guess it depends on the person too. I wear a Hamilton Jazzmaster or a Bulova and it just feels right. I can't imagine walking out of house without a wristwatch.
Also, at my University, a lot of my friends and peers have started wearing wrist watches after they saw mine, so it is not a fading thing.
There was a watch that was a full PalmOS device. You can still find them on eBay and they are probably still the most versatile watch computer ever sold.
With technology improvements it should be possible in a year or two to have a full Palm Pixi equivalent in a watch.
I have a website that tell you when your bus or streetcar is going to arrive and it would be very useful if there was some way to have that information on my watch. (The website is http://doconnor.homeip.net/TransSee/ ) Something similar to webos dashboard controls that get exported to your watch would be one approach.
Yep. Here it is...
http://www.amazon.com/Fossil-Wrist-PDA-Palm-OS/dp/B00009QR9X
(no longer for sale. ebay?)
Here are some from ebay. They are around $50.
http://shop.ebay.ca/?_from=R40&_npmv=3&_trksid=m570&_nkw=fossil+pda
looks almost like these, in color
http://www.vuzix.com/consumer/products_wrap310.html
I owned one of those and used it for about a year. It was a cool concept, but poor execution. The biggest complaint I had with it was that the built-in speaker was way underpowered. You couldn't hear alerts most of the time, making the PIM functionality nearly useless. The second problem was battery life (Hmm, sound familiar?). Lastly, it wasn't waterproofed. Just a personal preference, but I never take my watch off. Someone who's forgetful enough to need a PIM can't be trusted to remember to put his watch back on ;-)
Does that picture look like he is flipping us off?
He is but I think it is pointed to the people who are laughing at him right now
I just replaced the battery in my good ole' Timex for the first time in 5 years or so. The last thing I need is for someone to connect my watch to the cloud so it can suck down 100,000x more battery juice (and really not do much more).
Maybe I'm too old, but a connected watch seems like yet another solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
It's not about solving a problem but about the convenience factor and creating a new consumer segment.
off topic, how come every post is marked "new" when ever I come back to this site, it used to be with the old comments tool that only things new since the last page refresh were marked new
Hooray! More device complexity! One of the benefits of carrying a smartphone around is that I have been able to get rid of my watch. It's one less device I have to have on my body.
My 2 cents to this, and it's not the watch I'm talking about:
I've watched the complete speech and I must say that's some scary stuff he's talking about.
- Sensors everywhere
- People leaving information breadcrumbs everywhere
- having all your info in the cloud
- identifying people throu their faces and gathering all their info from the cloud.
You couldn't just learn their name, but also where they've been all day (sensors everywhere?), their health status, any trouble with the police and so on.
If the society develops in such a direction, it could be, that you have no choice but to submit to this information nightmare.
Those two sentences he talked about privacy, he scetched a third party driven "information fortress". This third party's task is to protect my information and all my information is gathered there (google anyone?). How can a third party be trusted so much? Even if the third party is trustworthy, who guaratees, that it stays that way.
Information in the cloud can not be deleted.
A third party can never be trusted forever.
That means any information stored in the cloud will at some time be in the wrng hands or even publicly available.
He should think about making it "insanely simple" for us to protect our information ourselves.
DRM is beginning to become more and more attractive if you ask me.
I sense a business opportunity in privacy services.
as a phone and a hotspot!!!!!!!
apple is marching on to global domination and hp is talking about pie in the sky **** with a plastic watch
Hey HP!
http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/
I would wear that over a watch any day!
Having seen the Veer on the Jimmy Fallon show, I can almost see mounting a Veer to a wrist band, but then I don't mind wearing my geek on my sleeve, so to speak.
I used to love my palmOS fossil / abacus watch. With the stylus in the wristband, would love to to have a watch that useful again.
Hmm, this sounds familiar...
http://direct.msn.com/
what a bunch of meaningless CEO bullshit, "hub of connectivity bringing separate devices together", OMG... Whatever pills he takes to remain sane, he should double the dose straight away.
Actually - the "hub of connectivity" is a very useful concept. I could save time and money with that capability right now.
That this is meaningless to you suggests that you might be better served with the Playstation phone.
...surely,being professional developer for 12 years, nearly all of this with Enterprise sector, makes me a target market for gameboy like devices. Or maybe it makes me to sense meaningless BS from the heights of management instantly? You choose.
actually,that quote I've provided is a typical example of managereese gibberish, that contains no information at all, and makes no sense at all. And appreciating this kind of stupid talk.. hmm, do as you like.
I have two questions to this all: WHAT and HOW. Please show me the answers to in this useles waffle above.
Do you have the same skepticism for Web 2.0, SOA and SAS? These are all general concepts (surely familiar to a 12-year developer) that require some underlying technology that provide a platform for many great ideas. The magic is in what you make out of the platform. It's that "vision thing". But you know that already, right?
Ok. A little quick visioning... You've already seen the touch-to-share demo. Imagine bringing your TouchPad to a meeting for note-taking. Then transfer to your desktop and/or information system later. Your notes are now search-able and linked to the appropriate pages on your project wiki.
I'll bet as a 12-year developer you could think of many more possibilities.
If anything not yet delivered as a product = BS, then we wouldn't have much, would we?
Eh casio already claims to have a low power bluetooth watch. It'll get alerts and because it used low power bluetooth should last a year or two on a single watch battery. You could probably increase the size of it a bit and make it kinetic as well.
I think the casio might be able to do caller ID with the alerts, but not much beyond that. Right now they are only planning on android support.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_3YjMntafA