History was made on Wednesday, with the simultaneous unveiling of the Samsung Galaxy Gear, Sony SmartWatch 2, and Qualcomm Toq. Although, a smartwatch market
has been created with these products unveiled, but the question is: Are these the smart-watches we have been waiting for?
Samsung held an event in Berlin, Germany, to unveil its new Galaxy Gear device, which goes on sale in early October for $300. The Gear is the more Dick Tracy-ish of the two watches revealed today. It links to your smartphone via Bluetooth and has an onboard mic and speaker, so you can make a call directly from your wrist. It also grants access to the S-Voice speech recognition and control software found on any Samsung Galaxy device through the watch for a variety of simple tasks such as checking the weather or drafting a text message. There's a 1.9 megapixel camera onboard as well, for capturing quick pictures and videos or taking video memos to save on your phone.
The Gear does a few things you'd probably expect of a smartwatch: It gives users control of the music on their phone, and tracks their movements with an onboard pedometer. But it also has a few unexpected features such as Auto Lock, which secures your phone whenever the watch and smartphone are separated by more than 5 feet, then unlocks them when they are in close proximity. And it runs apps such as the Vivino wine scanner, which will bring up information on any wine you take a photo of.
The Gear uses a 320 x 320 OLED screen and has a tiny 315mAh battery that the company says should be good for all-day use. That's great battery life for a phone, but terrible for a watch—it remains to be seen if people will tolerate recharging their watches every night. It's also a downer that the Gear works only within Samsung's Galaxy ecosystem. That's exactly the type of "can't play nice with others" mindset that got Sony's consumer electronics division in a hole over the last two decades.
Qualcomm, which is generally known as a wireless component manufacturer, is also taking a stab at the smartwatch market with its Toq device. (Get it? Tic, "Toq.") The Toq makes use of Qualcomm's ultra-low-power, passive Mirasol display technology. Like E Ink displays, Mirasol screens use reflected light and use almost no power in between screen refreshes, as opposed to LCD and OLED screens, which either use a backlight or create their own light. According to a Qualcomm spokesperson, that should give the Toq approximately a five-day battery life. Unlike E Ink, Mirasol is a color display technology, though the color gamut is nowhere near that of sophisticated LCD or OLED screens.
The Toq maintains a Bluetooth connection to any Android phone running 4.0.3 or later (iOS support is technologically possible, but not currently available), and taps into its notification system, allowing the watch to display a customizable stream of text message and email alerts, weather, etc. It can also control the phone's music player. The company will also launch a Premium Audio Edition of the Toq with independent stereo Bluetooth headphones.
Toq itself doesn't run on Android, Qualcomm instead uses ThreadX, an instant on real-time operating system that is also used in ultrasound machines and NASA deep space probes. The watch recharges wirelessly through its case, and the battery and inductive charging system are integrated into the Toq's wacky folding clasp. We got an early look at the device a few days ago, and it's a sleek, responsive and handsome piece of technology, even if it lacks some of the Gear's bells and whistles. Qualcomm wouldn't confirm pricing, but all signs point to a sticker close to $300, which would put it in the same ballpark as the Gear.
That's far less than Google's $1500 Glass price tag, but still above that of the Pebble, a $150 black-and-white smartwatch from the humble Kickstarter startup of the same name. The Pebble already has already sold 85,000 units and has developers working on custom apps for the device. That gave the folks at Pebble have a head start, but also generated enough interest in the category that the big fish are swimming into the smartwatch waters.
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