Blocks Announces the First Modular Smartwatch – Details

If you ever thought that your smartwatch is lacking a heart rate sensor, or you eventually realized that you should have waited for a better smartwatch, as the features are now getting older on your smartwatch. Or let’s say you finally want to throw your watch as charging it twice a day is troublesome for you. Well, it does look like you will have to buy a new smartwatch, and it might be your final smartwatch, as in the battery and the features won’t run out again.

We are talking about the concept, which came into highlight when it was first present out in the market, as a company called Blocks, wanted to create a modular smartwatch. Yeah, you heard it right, the same concept that we have heard about for smartphones, which is being under development under the name Project Ara by a team working in Google.

Since, then the company’s been working hard to bring their concept into fruition. As well as company managed to secure a $50,000 through the Intel’s Make it Wearable challenge. And they are also among the ten finalist that has a chance to take away half a million dollars if they win. Now looking at the possibility of winning, company does not want to sit idle as they have announced that they would be start a campaign to crowdfund the product. With this idea company wants to utilize the wearables enthusiasm among consumers and create the ultimate smartwatch.

To give a glimpse of the future of their product, company has released a teaser video showing off the design and capabilities it would provide its users. As they would be able swap and upgrade their smartwatch to a circular dial from a square or rectangle one, or can add as many as features using blocks.

“We are thinking of Tizen, Android Wear, Linaro (The OS Preojct ARA uses), and also developing our own OS on top of RTOS. We will do our best, so it can be compatible with Android, iOS and Windows Phone as we want it to be a truly open platform without limits.”

Company states on their website that, during their crowd-funding campaign, they would be offering number of peripheral modules. The list would include the modules like Extra battery pack, Heart rate block, SIM card block, Microphone block, GPS block (to determine the location) and NFC block for the contactless payments via the smartwatch. In future, company plans to produce and release many other modules.

Moreover, it will be an open platform for any entities like private companies, researchers, as well as community developers can create a new block that you will be able to upgrade in the future.

Currently, company wants to get started and would be charging $50 as an early founding member of the blocks community. It will be added to your future purchase of the blocks, meaning the $50 from the final price will be deducted. For instance, if you purchased touch screen and five additional sensor blocks for $250, the final cost would be $200 for founding member. Company, also allows you to cancel the membership, as you will get the full refund of the paid amount within 48 hours.

We know, after reading about it, the smartwatch enthusiast are getting extremely excited. Now let’s hope that the company hits that late 2015 (possibly Q4) launch window or maybe even launches sooner than that.

Source: TechCrunch