Hasta La Gadget!

In each issue of Distro, editor-in-chief Tim Stevens publishes a wrap-up of the week in news.

It seems like ages since Sergey Brin staged one of the most dramatic product launches of all time at last year’s Google I/O, guiding a bemused audience through a cavalcade of extreme antics that saw a prototype Google Glass headset delivered to the Moscone Center courtesy of skydivers, BMX riders and mountain climbers. This week, the very first Explorer Editions of Google Glass shipped to lucky recipients through rather more pedestrian means: UPS. Still, those deliveries were received with no less excitement.

These early units are shipping out in waves, with many of the I/O pre-orderers (including this eager editor) left waiting and watching unboxing videos with envy. The first videos of the early editions in action started hitting YouTube en masse, something we’re sure will become increasingly commonplace through the spring. We also finally got the full specs for the thing, including 802.11b/g and Bluetooth connectivity, 16GB of internal storage and a 5-megapixel camera capable of 720p video recording.

Filed under: Misc, Microsoft, HTC, Google, Facebook

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What’s an outgoing Microsoft executive to do on his last earnings call as CFO? Utter something that’d probably get the incoming CFO fired. Kidding aside, the outfit’s own Peter Klein saw fit to reiterate something we’d heard back in March — that Windows 8 is destined for smaller devices. To date, there isn’t a Windows 8-based slate on the market south of 10-inches, but as Apple, ASUS, Google and Samsung have found, people tend to like tablets that can be held with a single hand. Of course, the “coming soon” angle definitely adds a time stamp (albeit a vague one) that we didn’t have before, but we’re still no closer to figuring out what kinds of devices we’re to expect. A diminutive tablet? A smartwatch? A phone?

Earlier this week, Terry Myerson — corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Windows Phone division — admitted that the wearables space was undoubtedly an exciting one, though he wouldn’t go so far as to affirm that any of the code he oversaw was being tested on the arm. Of course, rumors have been running wild since Windows Phone‘s introduction that Microsoft would eventually push WP aside in favor of just using Windows on everything, so we suppose that’s another (far out) possibility. Wild imaginations are advised to contribute their best guesses in comments below. (But seriously, keep it sane. Thanks.)

Filed under: Handhelds, Tablets, Wearables, Microsoft

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Source: TechCrunch

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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It’s almost like Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft have actually launched smartwatches. Except of course they haven’t. But who cares! Analyst house ABI Research has been stroking its collective beard and come up with a forecast for the size of the nascent smartwatch market. And — drum roll please! — it reckons you can bank on more than 1.2 million of the wrist-strapped gizmos shipping this year.

Put another way, that’s about as many Raspberry Pi microcomputers shipped in its first year on sale. Or just over a third as many netbooks are predicted to ship this year (3.97 million units globally, according to IHS iSuppli). Which means smartwatches could be about as popular as a niche gadget for learning about computing/making a DIY robot, but less popular than the PC that’s cannonballing towards extinction the quickest.

Which sounds about as plausible as any guesstimate produced prior to any mainstream tech companies actually launching product. If you’re in the business of reading tea  leaves it helps if you wait for someone to make a brew before doing divinations.

ABI says its “market intelligence” of the “strong potential emergence of smart watches” — note the careful hedge, and don’t bet the farm on this one just yet — is based on the emergence over the past nine months of “a number of new smart watches”, which is likely referring to Kickstarter-funded Pebble and its myriad of wrist-coveting, crowdfunded competitors.

The analyst also says its forecast is based on ”contributing factors” that it reckons are encouraging the smartwatch market to (maybe) emerge from its Kickstarter-powered chrysalis and (possibly) blossom into a standalone butterfly — namely:

…the high penetration of smartphones in many world markets, the wide availability and low cost of MEMS sensors, energy efficient connectivity technologies such as Bluetooth 4.0, and a flourishing app ecosystem.

Even though the smartwatch market remains a partially formed, largely limp-wristed creature, listlessly stuck within its chrysalis of potential, ABI has already spotted four categories hoping to fly in the months and years ahead — aka: notification types (such as MetaWatch and Cookoo); voice operational smartwatches (such as Martian); hybrid smartwatches; and completely independent smartwatches — i.e. smartwatches that have their own OS and aren’t just playing second fiddle to a smartphone.

In the latter category, ABI cites I’m Watch as an example but also suggests that other “possible archetypes” could be “Apple’s hotly anticipated iWatch, Samsung’s Galaxy Altius and Microsoft[‘s ‘Windows Watch’, or whatever catchy name Redmond ends up bestowing on it, if indeed it ends up making such a thing at all]. If Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos or Justin Bieber decide to launch their own Android-powered smartwatches ABI would presumably add those in here too.

“Smartwatches that replicate the functionality of a mobile handset or smartphone are not yet commercially feasible, though the technologies are certainly being prepared,” adds senior analyst Joshua Flood in a quasi-illuminating statement of the potential factors that could influence this nascent market’s potential as the hands on our (non-smart)watches push inexorably on.

[Image by Telstar Logistics via Flickr]

Apple, Google, LG, and Samsung are all reportedly working on wrist-worn computing devices behind closed doors, and it seems like that little club of big companies may soon get another member. If a new report from the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, Microsoft has been in touch with an undisclosed number of suppliers who have apparently been tasked with delivering components for a smartwatch-like device that supports touch input.

Now that’s not to say that such a Microsoft smartwatch is a done deal just yet. The Journal’s sources couldn’t confirm that it would ever actually see the light of day, and I’d wager that’s because the folks in Redmond aren’t exactly sure themselves. After all, some of the company’s most intriguing potential products died ignominious deaths after being stuck in the research and production pipeline. Remember the Courier? The curious dual-screen tablet was apparently very far along (according to CNET, an employee who worked on Courier said it could’ve been completed in “months”) before Microsoft announced its demise in 2010.

It doesn’t help that the nascent smartwatch market has proven to be a tough one to crack. After all, the prospect of delivering a compelling user experience on a wrist-worn gadget isn’t a new one, and only a few of those devices (like the Pebble) could be considered anything close to successful.

Microsoft knows this all too well — the Redmond-based company debuted its SPOT (“Smart Personal Objects Technology”) data delivery service back at CES 2003, and it wasn’t long before watchmakers like Fossil, Suunto, and Tissot began folding SPOT into their own timepieces. Microsoft toyed around with at least one SPOT watch concept of its own, but as a company that was devoted largely to its software endeavors, it seemed more than happy to leave the finicky business of building watches to others before ultimately killing SPOT in 2008.

That’s not exactly the Microsoft we know today though. Early, fruitful hardware projects like the XBox and its successful successor have paved the way for a Microsoft that’s much more willing to take calculated chances on hardware. One could argue that devices like the Zune and Surface/Surface Pro tablets are more reactions to shifts in the consumer tech industry rather than game-changing innovations in their own right, but that’s not necessarily a problem when it comes to mass market gadgetry. The winner isn’t usually the company that does things first, it’s the company that does things best. For all we know, Microsoft could be the company best equipped to take the smartwatch concept and bring it to the masses, but we’ll have to wait and see if Redmond actually rises to that particular challenge first.