I'm sure you might have caught a glimpse of the Fossil Meta Watch (www.metawatch.org) announcement. http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/04/foss ... th-screen/

It's similar to inPulse in some ways. What do you think of it so far?

Things I like:
* 7 day battery
* Accelerometer
* Water proof
* Reflective display
* Threads? ("Open-source, low-power, multi-threaded embedded watch firmware")

Things I don't like assuming it is based on the CC430F6137 as the Chronos eZ430:
* Only a 20 MHz clock
* Only 4 KB of RAM
* Only 32 KB of flash, no SPI flash
* Limited non-Ubuntu or non-win32 development environment

This might be a misunderstanding, but no local applications? Fast Company says "the system has [...] apps running on the connected mobile device and mere graphical updates appearing on the phone's screen".

It's really hard to tell without more information, but from what we think we know, I agree with hudson.

$200 for a watch like that seems a bit steep. The 7 day battery life is pretty appealing though. In all honesty, the success of this kind of watches truly depends on the dev community. Fossil isn't new in the arena of smart watches but has never worked with a dev community as far as I know.

It's an exciting time. I was just musing how I'll miss my SPOT watches' functionality when Microsoft shuts down the network next year.

I love my EZ430-Chronos, but the metawatch, a.k.a the TI MSP-WDS430BT2000D - Bluetooth Wearable Watch development system with digital display is definitely a beefier platform than the Chronos was. It's based on the MSP430F5438A and the data sheets say that that chipset has 256KB of flash and 16K of SRAM.

The thing at which TI excels is low-power optimization. The TI watch has something like 6 different power-saving modes, and given that things like this will be squawking over Bluetooth which is not the best protocol in the world from a power consumption standpoint, I think it will good to have them.

I will probably get an inpulse and then one of those at some point, as I'm a bit of a watch geek. I haven't been able to find real hardware specs and data sheets for the inpulse (other than generalities like "ARM7"). Where can I find them?

If you want the analog version of the TI watch, it's the same but ends in -1000AD instead of -2000D.

inPulse has an LPC2103 ARM7 chipset on board. But to be honest, the chipset shouldn't be the focal point of a smartwatch discussion.

I agree. Design is important, and it looks like you've created something special here.

It's fair to assume though that for anyone leading with "Get Inpulse and hack your watch" that the test target demographic will be asking. I didn't mean any slight. As it is, I think people worry too much about clock speeds and the like - once you get into some of these embedded platforms, cycles don't mean what they do in general purpose computing.

Totally true. I think that catering to developers is extraordinarily important, and providing the groundwork (including all specs) is something we're working on improving. Accelerometer is always nice, but check out what an enterprising Invensense hacker did with inPulse! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXeMZkkN2Qs

What I really like:

* Long battery life
* Accelerometer
* Compatible with Palm/HP phones

If their dev environment is better than InPulse's, it's tempting. But they say nothing about the dev environment, so that's a red flag. Also, if the watch needs a phone to operate then that's a no-go for me, because I'm enjoying the InPulse's ability to make whimsical and fully-functional watch faces.

One thing I was curious about regarding battery life of the current inPulse watch is how would the charging circuitry cope if you added more battery cells in parallel, and some how built them into a special band?

I'm actually testing a couple things out, and plan on getting a small circuit board with a microusb connector on it. You'll plug this board into your watch, and it will have a battery attached to it. The battery will charge your inpulse battery, and you'll be able to plug a micro usb cable into it and charge this external battery.



You'll only need to plug the external battery into to charge the whole system. I was also thinking of having it be able to use like small watch batteries to cut the form factor down.