SMARTEN YOUR WRIST WATCH
Watches could soon replace the phone
Eat your heart out Dick Tracy! The comic strip police detective’s trade mark icon for thirty years from January 1946, his “Two- Way Wrist Radio”, has moved from fiction to reality. Anyone with ` 4,000 to spare today, can outdo Dick and flaunt his or her own personal communicator. Tech pundits say 2014 is the Year of the Smart Watch.
A dozen companies, both watch makers and phone makers, are currently engaged in a sangam of these twin technologies and are racing to bring their products to the market. Last week, two Korean giants unveiled their latest smart watches — Samsung’s Gear S, the latest iteration of its wearable accessory to the handset, is for the first time, a standalone device, capable of working, independent of a mobile phone and LG’s G Watch R revives the classic look and feel of a circular steel wristwatch. However, these would be available only towards the end of the year.
There are swirling rumours, that Apple too will launch its own wearable phone solution, along with its new iPhone model. From the other end of this merging market, Timex has recently launched a WiFi - enabled wristwatch, the Ironman One GPS.
On the application front, Japan Airlines has equipped its boarding gate staff with smart watches so that they can keep track of passengers’ whereabouts, while both their hands are busy. And aero solutions leader SITA, has released an app where passengers can receive boarding passes on their smart watch and board flights with a scan of their watch dials.
Amidst these developments, an Indian enterprise, Spice Retail, launched, arguably, the world’s most affordable standalone smart watch- phone. The Smart Pulse M- 9010 has a 4 cm touch screen and packs in a 0.3 megapixel VGA camera with video, a torch, dual SIM slots, an audio player, FM Radio, alarm and calculator. The internal memory is enough to store some 300 numbers, but you can add an 8 GB memory card. Connectivity is dual channel GSM with GPRS ( a bit wobbly) and WAP. You can receive voice and SMS but understandably, no e- mail.
It can be used as a standalone phone as there is a built in mike and speaker but it is advisable to attach earphones. A Bluetooth wireless headset is supplied free, along with two extra wristbands. The watch can
also be paired via bluetooth with any Android phone, in which case it can serve as an incoming call alert and a means of taking the call without pulling out your main phone. However, you can’t receive voice and data at the same time and have to settle for one or the other. Remember that this is not an Android device but one that seems to run on Java. This means that for installing things like bluetooth you have to download the special Spice software. But I’m not complaining. For an amazingly small asking price of ` 3999, I got a great smart watch experience. It’s not going to compete with my full fledged smart phone but sometime, somewhere, if my hands are full and I need to communicate while on the hoof, this dinky little device will make me Dick Tracy.
— Indiatechonline
The Smart Pulse M- 9010 has a 4 cm touch screen and packs in a 0.3 megapixel VGA camera with video