If the technology industry revolves in trends, then the Smartwatch is fast becoming the latest “fad” in town. With upstarts like the Pebbl and others in funding, and giants like Sony introducing refined versions it looks like the Smartwatch is the “in thing” right now. While there are a lot of people that see absolutely no point in the Watch, whether it’s a smart one or not, there seems to be more out there that are excited to see what these new devices could bring – myself included – and so there’s little surprise that apparently, everyone is working on a smartwatch.
Samsung, Sony, Apple, Motorola and others are obvious candidates for a smartwatch, right? Of course, but what about Qualcomm? The very same company that makes all of these fantastic processors that have helped us achieve speeds in smartphones and tablets that we only dreamed of a few years ago. While Qualcomm doesn’t sound like someone you’d think to produce such a device, they’re thinking of doing just that. Or at least, that’s what the infamous @evleaks Twitter handle is saying. They’re saying that it’s going to be called the ZOLA.
It’s apparently hitting the market in September and, other than that there’s no information out there concerning such a device. This is certainly one of those things that comes out of left field and surprises us all. Having said that, when you think about it a little more, Qualcomm would be a good fit for such a device. Not only do they have a massive catalog of CPUs to choose from but, they’re big in communication as well, meaning that they could quite easily make this device talk to all other devices. More exciting than that though, is that Qualcomm have been developing their own display technology for a long time now. Mirasol is a type of color display that they’ve been working on for years now, and have achieved little success with.
The problem is that Qualcomm can’t seem to make these displays viable in sizes that would be suitable to say a smartphone or tablet. A Smartwatch face though? That could be an easy target for them and, would allow for some brilliant battery life and readability in sunlight. I can see Qualcomm getting in on this game, and you know what, I can’t wait.