We had a slight surprise when we saw Tizen being used to run a portable personal cloud pocket webserver, and now we have Tizen running (hopefully) under the hood of another Smartwatch, but this time it’s not Samsung. The concept of this Smartwatch is different, “modularly” different. Just like the Modular Smartphone that projects like Project Ara are working on, the idea is that you might not need a new device every year, if only you could upgrade your camera, or processor, or upgrade your RAM. Well that is the idea that is now being applied to wearables. Blocks which you snap together to create a personal, unique smartwatch. Blocks.
Blocks sees wearables as something new, and somewhere that they can create new customisable versions with removable covers of products every few months. They also want to work Open software. Open hardware. Open design, which kind-of works for us as well. The company wants to create a “Block Store”, where any company or individual can build blocks that can be used in the new hardware ecosystem.
Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1dB4LzIVSU
They also entered Intel’s Make It Wearable challenge, and walked away with $50,000 funding and also access to their latest processors, which seems like perfect timing as Intel are becoming more active in this space. They are working on using Tizen as the base OS, and being compatible with Android, iOS and Windows phone (Sorry BlackBerry / Jolla / FireFoxOS). We hope to bring you more on this story soon.
