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Apple Reportedly Testing Inductive, Solar and Motion Charging For Its Smartwatch
An anonymous reader writes in with the latest from the rumor mill about a possible Apple smartwatch. "We've heard that when Apple reveals its first smartwatch product, there's going to be a heavy focus on health and fitness, but There might also be a way to charge the wearable without plugging it in, according to a report from the New York Times. Inductive charging came in a wave of smartphones last year, including Google's Nexus 4 and Nokia's Lumia 920 range, although we don't often see it in anything smaller than a phone (or camera) form-factor. Apple, however, is looking into cramming the same technology into its iWatch, or whatever it eventually calls its debut wearable."
These are basically all the possible ways to recharge a wristwatch that currently exist, except for physical mechanical contacts. This shouldn't be surprising because if there's one thing history has taught us, it's that Apple tries out practically every permutation of hardware in the R&D process. There were rumours that the "Apple tablet" would come in three screen sizes; it was later revealed that Apple had been testing three sizes on its campus to decide which one it preferred. There were rumours that they'd launch a version with no mechanical buttons; it was disclosed that Apple had tested that permutation too.
Whenever you read an Apple product rumour, before you even question the legitimacy of the source, ask yourself: is there any reason to suppose this is any more than a speculative prototype on their part?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
just walk over the inductive pads for buses and have your hand burned off at the wrist
For people who don't want data plans. The watch should be a phone.
...they miss the point and try and make it sing, dance & make morning toast for you and that the motion and solar charging is a frantic attempt to make the battery life acceptable. Inductive charging would be good but anyone in the smart watch arena needs to take a leaf out o Pebbles book and keep it simple.
They are still testing something like this? Samsung's Galaxy Gear came out already. The capability to quickly bring attractive and reliable products to market is a key factor in modern electronics industry.
"Motion charging".... hehehehe.... yeah I bet they test that a lot at Apple.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Just curious...is there a way to exclude/ignore particular sections in /.?
Max.
The elderly are in the sun a lot (gardening, etc), but I don't see the kinetic charging being useful for old people. Do Apple really understand the demographic they're marketing to? Inductive charging could go either way.
Nobody wears watches nowadays.
Instead they wear a small clock attached to a strap wrapped around their wrist.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
1. Near as I can tell, it's approximately 10 seconds of 'active' wear per hour of time-keeping. With a 48 hour reserve, that's approximately 4 minutes a day of 'active wear' to keep the watch 'fully' charged. source
2. Watch winders are often hideously priced, but should only be necessary if you keep self-winding watches like women keep shoes. If you have one, no problem, with 2 you're still fine if you alternate.
That being said, I'd imaging power requirements for something apple would be higher than simply keeping time, so you might need somebody very active.
I don't read AC A human right
I use one. A Casio G-Shock.
Except they are mechanical winding. The Sekio Kinetic which turns that into electrical charging seems to keep my watch working just fine, and I sit at a computer all day as my job.
Of course the issue is that mechanical electrical generation aka Sekio Kinetic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... and solar electrical generation aka the Citizen EcoDrive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... provide tiny amounts of power to keep a watch going, and could not provide anywhere near sufficient power for a smart watch.
Precisely, nobody wears watches nowadays.
> Put your phone down and start to live.
And by 'live' you mean 'troll on Slashdot'.
Or if you're me, the worst phone you could ever imagine (battery life, robustness, size, speech quality, too many button presses until i can do what i want to achieve).
I see you've never owned a Motorola RAZR then.
And of course, 30% of all harvested energy belongs to Apple.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
As long as it leaves the Galaxy Gear in the dust... but then, Apple could make something like that by accident.
There's nothing "elite" about the mechanism. I got a self-winding watch made by Seiko for my 18th birthday in 1973. I don't know what it cost, but we were a decidedly middle-class family. Still works great BTW.
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
My Lorus kinetic watch (bought 15 years ago for the princely sum of £20 so hardly prestigious) has a battery that will last 9 months if kept motionless. The problem is it doesn't have the juice to power a smartwatch. The advantage is it doesn't need to...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
My toothbrush uses inductive charging.
Some waterproof cordless shavers, but they're arguably larger than a cell phone.
Maybe it looked like a good idea centuries ago, but this flat place of the wrist where the watch lies is not a good place to put something you need to look at. You need to extend every muscle of the forearm just to look at it. Unless you tie the wristwatch loosely to the wrist. I think the concept of wristwatch itself is flawed. I hope they will provide a way to rotate it 90 degrees so that the watch itself will be closer to the base of the thumb. Or something like Leela's Wristlojackimator.
This is a good move by Apple. The downside to a smartwatch is a big one. We already have to deal with so many gadgets as we get up and move about the day, another can be more trouble than it's worth.
A smartwatch has one advantage over laptops and tablets as well as to a lesser extent a smartphone. Once we put it on our wrist, we can forget about it for the rest of the day. But that only makes its other hassle worse. We still have to remember to charge it. The batteries in ordinary digital wristwatches last months or even years. Given all it'll be doing, battery life is likely to be days at best. That's why self-charging (motion or solar) ir easy charging (inductive) will be appealing and could spell the difference between success and failure.
That still doesn't deal with an even bigger issue--will it do enough to be worth the cost and trouble? A lot of young adults I know have given up on wristwatches, as simple and cheap as they are. They use their cell phones instead. Most aren't likely to adopt a pricey smartphone if all it does is tell them the time or who is calling.
It is easy to see that medical and exercise data may help sell smartphones. Someone who's running doesn't want to stop to see their heart rate and someone who's really into exercise may want to see that data recorded moment by moment. But is that enough potential customers? Maybe not.
Making matters worse is that the iPhone remains like Hans Christian Andersen's story about "The Princess and the Pea." It's is a very temperamental device that doesn't like rain or being dropped. That negates its value for outdoor activities with that smartwatch. It's daily need for a recharge, only makes also recharging that smartwatch a more obvious hassle. A iPhone model that's a bit thicker but has the same several day battery life as that smartwatch would make life simpler. So would an induction recharging pad that works with both overnight.
I wear a casio calculator watch, it was only 19.99 CDN. I bought both they had left.
My brother has one of those Chinese phone watches that does everything - even has a camera, SIM and MicroSD in it, and it's about the same size as my Breitling Navitimer. Maybe a smidge thicker. He also has a Tag Heuer analogue watch that has motion charging built into it. I'm pretty sure I can combine the two and get a patent on the corners...
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I have a MotoRAZR V3i and a V3r, I'm pretty sure you guys can't be referring to either of those as "worst phone ever" because frankly, they're the best phones ever.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I carry a full-size wall clock in a backpack which I pull out to check the time.
They are still testing something like this? Samsung's Galaxy Gear came out already. The capability to quickly bring attractive and reliable products to market is a key factor in modern electronics industry.
Why are they testing this iPod thing? I mean Creative Labs and others have come out with MP3 players already. The ability to quickly bring attractive and reliable products to market is a key factor in modern electronics industry (so there isn't a hope in hell this iPod thing will ever be a commercial success).
The thing is that first to market is not everything. You also have to design the stuff you bring to market well and Apple has a history of appealing to customers by successfully reinventing/redesigning stuff that others have implemented badly and Apple evidently believes they can do it again.
I leave the whole quote just to show how history is being slowly rewritten. The short version is Apple ripped off Creative Labs Menu and ended with Apple agreeing to pay Creative $100 million US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Or you can also state it as CmdrTaco's infamous quote about the iPod... "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
...and has been proved right. Android Phones have killed off the iPod market.
Your writing is misleading - Xbox 360 sold maybe 80 million units up to and including last year, not last year. Big difference. And of course Apple TV is just at the beginning. But right now they are selling more than Xbox 360 every quarter, and have done for two years, and still increasing.
You are a fantasist; Sales of Apple TV (its 3rd Generation Product) over the last year has sold a (none too shabby) 6 Million units http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.... Its in its 3rd Generation and has been on sale 2007. Its market is now threatened by (media) consoles (and yes the xbox sells better...as does the Playstation note I don't separate the revisions), Intelligent Blu-ray players, Streaming devices like the Roku and Android devices, and the Chromecast, and that is without mentioning the massive growth of smartTV and similar products.
Apple TV could have been Apples next device. It isn't...it wasn't...it will never be. In my mind it is Cooks second biggest failure. His first not spending its cash horde on some serious acquisitions.
Long ago, I got into an argument with a superior. I was insisting that the next big leap in electronics would be wireless charging. He firmly believed, in late 2008, that this would be impossible, dangerous, and never come close to being worth the investment for any company. I believed there would be a way to do it, especially with low-power devices, and likely even unto light bulbs. I feel vindicated today.
If this is the case, then Apple are idiots.
In this sense, "elite" is just a euphemism for "dumbshit". There is a limited quantity of people who are stupid enough ("elite enough", whatever) to spend that amount of money on a watch - unless its an investment, and then it wont be worn. So Apple would be trying to enter a saturated market.
A watch can be easily connected to the blood vessels in the wrist and use the O2 / glucose mix as an energy source like the rest of your body. Recharge by eating. This would be real bleeding-edge technology.
Note that the use of blood as a power source (for implants) is seriously being researched. Look up "biofuel cell".
the Slashdot crowd still hasn't gotten over the shock of people preferring simplicity and portability over features.
Actually most have their music on their phones. I use https://play.google.com/store/... Vanilla Music on Android. In fact people everywhere are ditching their iPods for Android.
Other readers should note that Apple TV has never outsold the xbox360, with sales for 2012-2013 at well below half of the xbox360 sales. Even if it were to sell well, the original Apple TV has not been sold for some time, and was never successful. The point stands regarding the failure of that product.
We shouldn't be encouraging hardware vendors to refer to all of their products with the same name as this causes confusion for comparing products and evaluating specific usability. For example, the first generation Apple TV had no 1080p support at all, while the latest generation has 1080p support but only at below or equal to 30fps. Not only are the multiple generations different hardware, they also have significantly different specifications both from a technical and usability perspective.
I wonder if Apple is aiming to eliminate the need to remove your watch for charging.
I've owned basically waterproof watches since the 1980s and seldom take them off for any reason except for situations where the watch might get in the way.
One limitation to any smart watch seem to me to be how often it needs to be taken off to charge.
It's hard to see any smart watch that does anything useful charging solely by the means listed, but I do wonder if there's some way to maintain or extend the charge so that the watch has to be charged externally a lot less often.
Intel processors are more energy efficient aka 250mW...!
http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/19/tech/innovation/solar-powered-intel-chip/
As the previous AC said, it was just like the typical "First!" posting on any forum.
Ironically Apples smartwatch is still vaporware. the Galaxy Gear is out and selling; I suspect a better Galaxy Gear Revision will be out before Apple gets itself organized. Samsung have learned having prototypes in the back room causes them to be kicked around in the courts over a few design/interface patents, because Apple said "First!". I am not sure who will control the smartwatch market or even if there is one, but if there is Samsung are in a strong position to capitalize on it...Apple not so much.
Apple needs to figure out a way to harness shame, anger, frustration and greed to charge their devices.
Talk about an inexhaustible energy source.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Apple has a history of putting new Employees on fake projects to see if They can keep Their mouths shut.
The iPhone arrived late? What else was available in 2007 with a touch screen, browser, etc? I mean I don't like them any better than the next guy, but I'm interested to know what prior art you speak of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... browsers have been available on phones since at least 1994 ironically the first example given fro a mobile browser is the Apple Newton!? It suggests the first mobile phones was in 1996 with " Unwired Planet (later to become Openwave) put their "UP.Browser" on AT&T handsets" So beating Apple by 11 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... capacitive touch screen work began in 1965!? Hell the nintendo DS even have touchscreen back in 2004. In fact a whole host of companies where working on todays capacitive phone around that time...including samsung. In fact famously the iPhone looks eerily similar to a Sony Prototype. Although here is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... LG Prada which was on the market 6 months before the iPhone.
The original iPhone was a hell of a device, but was built on established technology.
Fangs on the bottom to extract your blood. Should be popular with Diabetics too..
Sounds like a WIND UP!
Amazing. Revolutionary.
THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING. AGAIN!
Thank GOD for Apple. Could you imagine if the computing world were left to the likes of Microsloth, Linsux and Scroogle?
Think different.
Think BETTER.
THINK APPLE!
I have Several V3is I use as backups. Surely not even a contender for worst phone ever. Work great as a modem too.
I have a Pebble and charging is probably the least convenient part of things (plug in USB adaptor, plug in charger cable, charge watch).
The little magnetic charger clip isn't too bad, but is pretty easily detached if things get bumped.Being able to have a "base station" of some sort that does wireless charging - similar to newer phones can - would be very nice. They could have designer base-stations that look nice as well.
Make it look like, and then all you need to do is drop you watch on the little pad before bedtime. No messing around with cables etc, which reduces clutter.
the Slashdot crowd still hasn't gotten over the shock of people preferring simplicity and portability over features.
Actually most have their music on their phones. I use https://play.google.com/store/... Vanilla Music on Android. In fact people everywhere are ditching their iPods for Android.
I'd probably rewrite that to say that people are ditching iPods for smartphones -- unless you have an agenda.
Nothing to do with an Agenda...Although the fact that you did not want to correct iPod to MP3 Player Market screams at your own. The reality is the MP3 Market was the iPod market...in the same way the smartphone market is the Android market.
Please look up what vaporware is.
Vaporware is a term in the computer industry that describes a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is never actually released nor officially cancelled.
The Apple smart watch is a rumor and speculation by people outside Apple. Apple might be working on a smart watch and may have been doing so for years, but Apple isn't going to announce it until it is ready for sale.
From your link "Vaporware is also a term sometimes used to describe events that are announced or predicted, never officially cancelled, but never intended to happen." it is the sentence after the one you quote. Never has a Username been so apt.
Eco drive watches are (most models) run by an electric motor. Surely a digital smart watch would use less power with the right display, yes?
Wristwatches are broken by design. It hurts when you place the watch in front or your eyes.
I buy a new watch for about $10, because the watch, band, and battery all have limited reliability after that. I don't see why I need to buy an Apple watch.