Qualcomm reveals 'Toq' smartwatch Qualcomm has become the latest gadget manufacturer to decide a smartwatch is a jolly good idea, revealing the “Toq” to world+dog today. The company says the name “Toq” is not supposed to the distinctive sound of a mechanical watch's gears moving, but is instead a riff on “talk”. Just why is hard to say. Qualcomm's canned …
You are right! ... also all these watch makers are scared as shit over making rolex running bankrupt... cuz rolex will inturn sue their ass off.. think of replicting rolex display on LCD... thats why these devices are ugly as shit. then the battery is 4 days... and above that websites including alReg worshiping and bowing to 4days charge saving their sorry asses from 1day... this phenomenon is same as car websites never let u know fuel efficient petrols ... if u search for 40mpg cars they start spitting ay ur face with hybrid models. this phenomenon is same as u can never find a laptop ... they let u do 8GB or better, this CPU or better ... and spit on ur face cpus of higher clock but crappy generation. then alReg who like PiedPiper is taking god knows what fools behind them of look we are going to make LOHAN... yay lets eat shit! and rejoice and thank heavens! ... when they could use the makerbot fever in contstructive use say server class laptops ... alReg never tires from praysing seamicro but instead of keeping itself with IT .. they chose to yank off for some space odessy... afterall they have mint money on their home turf of starwars fanboys/pons. The beast what such wristwatches have come to is from eInk seiko, capable of 1year juice thanks to e-ink tech. else and for bezzel less, larger wrist covering results we should for example rip the eINK display from SamsungNote3's "SViewCover" use makerbot for housing, battery and minor self made PCB to send displays. trust me these Wimm, Sony, Nano, Mirasol not atleast for next 3-5 years will reach u the form factor of ur dreams. and only Mirasol/eInk tech can save.
Hitching a ride. You didn't get it: The Great White Handkerchief is mentioned on page 1, book 1 of the Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy*, together with Quxy's mention of the digital watch in the first post. Hence the thumb. It was a confirmatory follow-up.
Best to answer with a snide remark now, lest you should look slow . . .
*in five parts.
Funny I was thinking exactly the opposite. Thought the Samsung one was fugly; has crap battery life (charge at least once a day? Anyone? Bueller?) and a screen that you have to turn on before you can view it.
I tried an iPod Nano gen6 in a Tik Tok strap for a while; looked ok but having to turn it on every time I wanted to see the time got annoying really quickly.
yeah i know, it sounds silly to be complaining about hassle of taking phone out etc. but consider how big some of these phones are, that they might be in a bag, or may be in one of those fiddly flippy covers etc, or you might not be in an area where you wanna be flashing an expensive smartphone. when you consider you can interact with your phone from your watch, it starts to become appealing.
i have a pebble and can skip music tracks forward and back from the watch rather than pulling my phone out. it's great cos i skip tracks quite a lot.
having said that, you could rightfully question why i have so many songs i don't want to listen to but that's a conversation for another day.
true, very true.
i guess you have to weigh that all up with which areas you wander into with your expensive tech. are you likely to get mugged by the "grabbing your phone and riding away on a bike" type of scallywag or the "gimme your effin money or i'll cut you up" type of hoodlum?
maybe we should just designate some places as no go areas for anyone with anything more technical than a casio lcd watch.
The display is a great idea. Mirasol is a low power display which was meant to be used for e-readers but didn't take off. Perhaps it had cost or production issues but the the smaller screens and always-on make it viable for watches. Putting OLED / LCD screens in watches is stupid since it all but guarantees the battery life will be terrible and the screen has to turn off to conserve power.
This watch though looks pretty ugly. It has an ugly black or white bar with a Qualcomm logo on it under the display for reasons that make no sense to me. It totally ruins the form of the watch IMO. Let's hope some other manufactures with a better design team pick up the tech.
They intend to sell these devices so they are not just reference designs. So I think it's fair game to criticise the design.
Anyway I hope they do licence their screens. I've always been enthusiastic about mirasol (partly from being so pissed off with e-ink) so I'd be happy to see the tech succeed. It's not perfect by any stretch - the refresh rate can be crap compared to OLED but it uses a lot less power and would be useful in watches and other low power display situations.
They were touting e-readers 3 years ago with the tech. They even had a production e-reader called Kyobo which used it. People generally praised the screen for it's low power draw and performance in sunlight but said it looked muted / washed out compared to OLED / LCD which is hardly surprising.
Anyway perhaps production yields and/or cost made it unviable and people wanted the shiny.
Perhaps by focussing on smaller screen sizes they can improve their yields and lower expectations a little.
Sure, but I also remember the days when I had a watch that needed winding - every day was best to to make sure you remembered.
It still did its job but that was just to tell me the time - if it could have done more I would have been impressed, even if it meant I would have had to carry another device.
My smartphone (which needs charging as often as my old watch needed winding but takes longer over it) can do some useful things and some of those things are made even more useful if the resulting information can be sent to my wristwatch with an accompanying, silent, alert.
It may not be for everyone but charging a watch every week or so is an acceptable compromise for me.
Everytime I hear about yet another company promising to launch a "smartwatch" I get this mental picture of a dozen or so trains, all running on their tracks at full speed, converging to a single intersection.
Meanwhile, I wonder what will happen out there in the real world, when all these devices, sporting virtually the same features, hit the market at the same time?
See icon.
It's just a watch.
And Surface RT is "just a tablet", but when it flopped to the tune of a nearly $1b write-off heads started to roll.
Now imagine that some of the companies presently entering the smartwatch fray also end up building "a few more devices than they can sell", to borrow a Ballmerism.
Interesting times ahead, that's what I say...
Battery life may be a nice feature, but these days at least I'm used to charging my gear daily. So while it's nice I won't have to charge daily with the Toq, I find the big ticket item is the screen being visible in sunlight. Having used the the analog SonyEricsson Fossil made BT watch, the MBW-150, which was an addictive tool, and reasonably stylish, its OLED screen was totally invisible in direct sunlight, and very hard to read in daylight. While the Toq is an all digital, I find the big ticket item is its screen is always on, and visible outdoors, and even in the sun. The other features, such as a carrying case for the BT headset that also doubles as a wireless charging station is appealingly creative. Impressive for a first product of this type from Qualcomm.
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