USA TODAY International Edition
Smartwatches are on the way
News coming this week from Samsung, Sony, Qualcomm
Sony, Samsung expected to show off devices in Berlin this week.
SAN FRANCISCO News out of two events this week — one in California, the other in Europe — will provide strong clues as to whether this year’s holiday shopping season is the first when smartwatches garner more attention than smartphones or computer tablets.
In Berlin, at the consumer electronics show known as IFA, Samsung and Sony are expected to show off early attempts at a combination computer/ timepiece/ mobile phone worn on the wrist, a product category that many are now calling a smartwatch.
Sony is already marketing its SmartWatch product, which can be purchased on eBay or Amazon. com for prices ranging from $ 104 to $ 130, respectively, although the product won’t be available until Sept. 18, at the earliest.
Samsung, meanwhile, has confirmed development of its own wearable device, as Lee Young Hee, the executive vice president of the company’s mobile business, told Bloomberg News in March.
Both Asian electronics makers hope to steal a little thunder from Apple, which is hosting an event on Sept. 10 at which it’s widely expected to unveil a new iPhone or two, and perhaps something more.
The company’s hiring trends suggest its widely rumored smartwatch will also be a personal health- monitoring device, while a patent application from rival Google late last year suggests it’s developing a wearable computer with a flexible screen.
START- UPS GET THERE FIRST
All these technology giants are probing an undeveloped market staked out by smaller start- ups already selling smartwatches, including the Pebble, which made news when it received 85,000 orders for its $ 150 device via the crowdfunding website Kickstarter.
Yet the more intriguing event this week takes place in San Diego, where Qualcomm, the No. 1 maker of wireless chips, is hosting its annual devel- opers’ conference, called Uplinq.
On Aug. 8, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs was spotted wearing a smartwatch during an interview at a public event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. When he was asked about the device, however, he quickly covered it with his sleeve.
Six weeks earlier, on June 26, Qualcomm filed a trademark application for a device called Qualcomm TOQ, which was described as “a personal communication hub in the form of a wristwatch.”
Although none of my Qualcomm sources would confirm that Jacobs would unveil smartwatch technology during his Uplinq keynote on Wednesday, several tech blogs are reporting that he indeed will. That would be important, for two reasons.
The first is the company’s history as a leader in wireless technology for more than two decades.
Qualcomm founder and former CEO Irwin Jacobs — the father of Paul Jacobs — earned many seminal wireless patents, and the company’s wireless CDMA technology has become the standard in the most advanced phone networks on the planet — known as 3G and 4G.
Most of the leading makers of smartphones and tablets, including Samsung and Apple, license and use Qualcomm chip technology in their devices. If Qualcomm puts its product research muscle behind smartwatches, it could speed development of the market significantly.
Second, Qualcomm is working on other technologies that could make the smartwatch of the near future look more like something in a Star
Trek movie than the simple wrist phone of comic- strip hero Dick Tracy.
These new capabilities are being built into the latest Qualcomm chips, called the Snapdragon 800 series, which Jacobs first described during a keynote speech at the CES trade show in Las Vegas in January.
One of these combines three different technologies — audio recognition, image recognition and so- called geofencing, which use GPS data to alert a mobile device that it’s close to a certain object, or within a certain location — into one wireless development platform.
USING YOUR SURROUNDINGS
Known as the Gimbal software development kit, or SDK, it allows developers to create mobile apps that automatically adapt to a user’s surroundings. It’s “a context- aware platform,” as Jacobs described it in January, and which the company first began testing in Japan in December.
In May, the Gimbal SDK was used by Paramount Pictures to help develop an application designed for fans of the latest Star Trek movie, Into Dark
ness.
The gamelike app allowed mobile users to locate and interact with billboards, posters and trailers promoting the film, and automatically rewarded them for doing so.
Another Qualcomm platform, called Vuforia, will likely have a much greater impact in health care than in Hollywood. A rival experimental platform to the one that runs the Google Glass wearable computer, Vuforia, is being designed to power a new generation of wearable devices that can monitor and record human vital signs and other bodily processes.
To encourage Vuforia developers, Qualcomm has created what it calls the $ 10 million Tricorder XPrize, named after the handheld medical diagnostic device used in the world of
Star Trek.
The prize “aims to reinvent health care by creating a device that lets users diagnose themselves,” as its mission statement says.
Or, as Paul Jacobs said at CES in January, Qualcomm wants to spur the development of devices that “put personal health in the palm of your hand,” giving human beings what he calls “a digital sixth sense.”
If Jacobs can get Qualcomm’s newest chips into the smartwatches of the future with the same ubiquity that its previous technologies have been built into smartphones and tablets, that future may come to pass sooner rather than later.