well, well, well... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...oogle-apple-with-operating-system-for-watches
Patently moronic. They have neither the presence in the tech industry nor the marketshare at that price point to do something like this. But I'm an RN, not a MBA, so what the hell do I know?
They have the money... if anyone can and should it's them. My qualms are not using the android base.. but freash sheet is not a bad plan.
As @Foo2rama stated; not going with Android out of the gate is a bad idea if they're going to step into that world. TAG did it but you have the Android world not looking to spend $1500 on a watch. Most of the Android users do not want to spend more that $300 which is why LG has these things priced at $249. It's a consumable market and they do not hold any value so if it's not cheap enough it won't sell, at least to anyone that wants a "smart" watch. My two pennies
We will see if this is more of a slow poison than the Quartz revolution. Though I own many quartzs myself!
I've done it on more than one occasion, although usually I do it while at home and only my wife can roll her eyes at me...
i guess it would be a creative way of doing a GMT. I dont have the skill to even put a watch on my right wrist.
I think daringfireball nailed it. (emphasis in bold, mine.) The interesting part of this story is that it's taken this long for The Swatch Group to even develop a plan.
I think a good business plan for them would be to make the watch like a case with high end finishing that can be continually updated as necessary. Then the case is not consumable (disposable) and there is the possibility that it can be passed to future generations as a high end mechanical so long as it can be updated and the electronics swapped out as needed. If it was made out of gold (or platinum or palladium) and cheap enough, I might be tempted...
Would like to find out more, but based on this article I am not convinced they will have success with a smart watch. I owned a smart watch, it was a Pebble, but I lost it. I think it was $150 or something like that via kickstarter. It provide limited features, but was compatible with android, so certainly adding features looked to be promising. I lost it about two years ago, so I have no idea how much more functionality is available. But at that time I could basically be notified if a text came in on my phone if my phone was in my pocket. And check the time. But the bigger issue....if I own a Speedmaster, then why wear a smart watch? And if I ever were to go mad dogging, it would be with two Speedmasters.
Its probably still going to be some Linux or BSD derived thing as you'd be really doing things the hard way to want to reinvent the wheel here just for a smart watch, so the end result could end up being almost the same as Android OS anyway. Developing the hardware OS and client facing software on your own by 2018 is not going to be easy, especially for a company with no real background in this. The TAG Heuer Connected though I'm thinking is the inspiration for it, people laughed when JCB announced it and now he can't make the damn things fast enough, they're just flying off the shelves for TH.
