Hasta La Gadget!

The smart watch is one peripheral that has not really caught on, although it is one interesting device which has spawned its fair number of versions from various manufacturers. We have seen the likes of the Pebble and Samsung Galaxy Gear, so what about this particular model which is known as the My Kronoz? The £69.99 My Kronoz smart watch happens to be a sleek and affordable entry for those who want to dip their toes into the world of smart watches, as it opens up the door for one to manage incoming calls directly from your wrist itself.

The My Kronoz smart watch will hook up to your smartphone via a Bluetooth connection, where it sports a 10 meter working range – just like all Bluetooth devices out there. It is capable of vibrating whenever there is an incoming call to function as a way of alerting you, the wearer, while showing off the incoming call’s ID or number on its OLED display so that you need not take out the smartphone itself to check out just who has made that phone call. Not only that, it comes with a classic Casio look that carries a retro slant to things. The internal battery is said to last up to 3 days on a single charge, now how about that?
[ My Kronoz Smart Watch tells the time in style copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

The past decade has seen the consumer electronics war grow more furious and more personal: your living room is a battlefield, as are your desks and your pockets. Now, more than a year-and-a-half since the Pebble (née Allerta) team saw its e-Paper smartwatch concept shatter a $100,000 Kickstarter funding goal, gadget purveyors of all stripes are vying for a spot on your wrist.

As I write this, a Jawbone UP24 is lashed to one of my wrists (being mindful of all the steps I’m not taking) and a Pebble just buzzed on the other. We unabashed nerds have embraced the smartwatch age with open arms and open wallets, but what’s been going on since those heady days of mid-2012?

The Bubble Keeps Growing

The buzz around wearable second-screen tech has been enough to inspire players both small and massive to enter the fray. It used to be that you couldn’t check out the new projects on Kickstarter without basically tripping over scads of smartwatch concepts — some were neat, some seemed more than a little shady, but all of them were meant to capitalize on the notion that using our amazing pocket computers of the future didn’t make consuming information easy or frictionless enough. And of course, bigger players are itching to make their market on a growing market, too.

Don’t take this as a completely comprehensive list, but Pebble, Martian, Samsung, Sony, ZTE, Fitbit, Basis, Neptune, Metawatch, and Qualcomm are all companies that have either already let their smartwatches loose on the world, or have confirmed that they’re working on a smartwatch. Qualcomm is a particularly interesting example, too — it’s best known as a semiconductor maker, a chip slinger whose wares are obscured by shells of plastic and metal, but its new TOQ smartwatch is slowly making its way out to media outlets and average joe consumers in exchange for $350.

Meanwhile, LG, Dell, Apple, and Google (which, remember, is still very distinct from Motorola) are strongly rumored to have wrist-worn gadgets under development behind closed doors. That list features the world’s most prominent consumer electronics players, and it under represents all the upstart companies who think they can deliver their own gadgets faster and better than their lumbering rivals.

No One Has Cracked The Formula Yet

If smartwatches are going to be as disruptive as so many companies believe they will be, at least one of them is going to have to strike a chord with a wide consumer audience in a big way. But which combination of price, performance, and PR is going to make that happen?

In a Google Hangout with YouTube tech personality Marques Brownlee, Motorola Mobility CEO Dennis Woodside confirmed that it was working on a wrist-worn gadget of its very own (probably the purview of the new “world-class wearables design group” it’s been slowing putting together). What was more interesting than that tacit confirmation was Woodside’s candid — if clipped — exposition on the potential pitfalls that come with dramatically trying to augment what the concept of a watch entails.

“There’s clearly gonna be something that changes on your wrist, how it works and what exactly it is is something our teams are working on hard,” Woodside said. “Whatever it is, it has to compete with what works now.” He added later that the wearables team has been given a set of challenges to surmount, too: “We can’t have something fragile, we can’t have something that needs to be charged everyday. You’re going to have to have some functionality that’s just killer otherwise why spend the money on yet another product.”

If that last bit sounds a little “well, duh” you’re probably in good company. That said, the approaches that smartwatch makers have taken vary wildly. At one end of the spectrum you have watches like the Martian, which looks almost completely like a something your father would wear albeit with small text displays and the ability to heed voice commands. One the other end are devices like the hefty Neptune Pine which basically shrinks an entire smartphone down to the point where it (sort of) fits around a human arm. The rest of the pack hovers somewhere between those extremes, making for a smartwatch market that’s both crowded and tough for average consumers to grok.

Speaking of consumers…

People Don’t Seem To Be Going Crazy For Them

There’s also the little issue of how many people would actually want to own a smartwatch, an accessory that, at worst, mimics what your smartphone can already do and, at best, augments it substantially. What few sales figures announcements out there point to some slowish uptake though: Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky told us last month that the startup has sold over 190,000 of its smart watches, nearly 100,000 of which were sold after the Kickstarter campaign officially closed. That means they were moved through the Pebble website, and through AT&T and Best Buy Stores — they’re all good outlets to move units, but they all seem to have plenty of the units in stock now which could represent slackening demand after the initial rush.

And of course, there’s Samsung. After rumors that it had sold a scant 50,000 Galaxy Gears to users began to bubble up, Samsung publicly insisted that it shipped 800,000 to retailers. Of course shipping units to stores and selling units to end users are two entirely different beasts, so the actual number of people walking around town with Galaxy Gears on their wrists remains frustratingly vague. Bear in mind, those are two of the most prominent smartwatch players out there right now. At this point it seems all too possible that the number of smartwatches that get churned out could exceed the number of people who find any sort of value in them.

Some day, archeologists will look back on our civilization and wonder why we had so many smartwatches. Case in point: the Oscilloscope Watch by Gabriel Anzziani is a wild little bit of gear that adds the power of a fully-functional oscilloscope to your wrist. Why? Because don’t worry about it, that’s why.

The watch contains a small XProtolab system a which includes an oscilloscope, waveform generator, logic analyzer, protocol sniffer, and frequency counter inside a tiny package. Anzziani’s DIY, 3D-printed version is obviously not much to look at right now but if he hits his $60,000 goal you can expect to see a much nice product down the line.

The watch will include two analog inputs that will be connected via a keychain fob or perhaps the watch band – that’s still to be decided – and it will have eight digital inputs. A 128×128 will bop out the waveforms (and watch faces) and you should be able to, at the very least, measure your Arduino projects on the fly. The first watches can be had for a $100 pledge and he expects to ship by April of next year.

Do you need an oscilloscope watch? No way, Jose. But it’s great to know there is someone out there thinking of the hardware hackers who, at some point in their lives, have wished they had a little oscilloscope on their wrist.

So we talked about smart watches this entire week, we’ll talk about the next iPhone and different color options all of next week and we’ll eventually start seeing if the upcoming iPad and iPad Mini are worth a damn next month which will give way for a conversation about the Xbox One, PS4, Kinect, rumbling triggers and DualShock 4s before the holidays. Oh and we can’t forget about the Nexus 5 and whatever else Google has up its sleeve. Sprinkle in different sentences about whatever new buzzy laptop or new black puck or maybe even an amazing TV and well, there are a lot of things going on right now in our shiny gadget world.

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According to GigaOM, Google bought WIMM Labs last year to help develop its upcoming Android smartwatch. WIMM Labs was the maker of the WIMM One, a smart watch released a few years ago that ran a modified version of Android.

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