The concept of Smartwatches is not new and there are plenty of smartwatches available in the market. However, the makers of these smartwatches have mainly focused on bringing your smartphone at your wrist, but that leads to confusion as navigating number of apps at a small display gets tedious.
To simplify the tasks and provide customers a watch with easy navigation without cutting on Smart features and style, a Bangalore-based IoT firm – Witworks has launched a smart wearable device named “Blink” at the ongoing event TechSparks 2016 which is India’s biggest tech product startup showcase.
Witworks is a Bangalore-based consumer tech company founded by Somnath Meher, along with fellow IIT-Kharagpur alums Ankit DP and Chandrashekhar Iyer, that creates connected devices for the home and lifestyle spaces. The company currently sells Rewind, a headphone cord detangling device. Blink is its latest product that’s been under development since November last year.
Blink for the most part, is like any other mainstream smartwatch we see nowadays. But, according to the CEO of the company, a smartwatch isn’t supposed to be a phone on your wrist, it should only possess what is essential to be on the wrist. Blink smartwatch runs on Marvin OS which is company’s custom OS built on top of Android 5.1 and utilizes swipes from watch’s bezels and voice commands to get things done.
The Blink smartwatch houses number of features, to begin with, Blink allows tracking fitness activities, playing music, sync notifications, navigating to a destination, locating landmarks like restaurants and more. There is a Timeline feature that intuitively shows your calendar appointments, to-dos, reminders, and alarms on a single page. Additionally, you can read and reply to notifications through your voice commands. It has the ability to integrate third-party services allowing Blink to run functions from barebone essentials such as playing music to accessing payment gateways.
As far as raw specifications are concerned, Blink features a 1.39-inch Full-Circular AMOLED display with a resolution of 400 x 400 pixels up front capable of screening 16.5 Million colors. Talking about the design, the Blink smartwatch flaunts a stainless steel body and has a scratch resistant 2 mm thick Gorilla glass 3 on top. On the performance front, it is powered by a dual-core processor clocked at 1.2 GHz paired with 1 GB of RAM.
The smartwatch is backed by a 320 mAh battery underneath that the company claims can provide life of up to 2 days. Furthermore it sports 8 GB of internal memory to store your favourite songs. Through voice commands you can perform various tasks such as booking a cab and lot more. It sports Bluetooth 4.0 with BLE for connectivity. The watch also comes with a speaker and a microphone with noise cancellation. It offers a wide array of sensors including a 9 axis motion sensor with an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer.
There are two colour options to choose from – stainless steel black and stainless steel silver. Further, you can customize your watch by three models depending on your usage – a silicon strap for Sports, a black or tan leather strap for Classic look and lastly custom designed silver and black metal straps in steel variant.
As we move into a connected future, smart wearables, especially watches, are at a very interesting stage. The technology is in place, and there’s enough awareness amongst consumers. But the lack of relevant use-cases, ease of interaction and genuine design-empathy have prevented them from taking off. With a blend of technology and design, we are looking to solve that and make smart-wearables ubiquitous.
– Somnath Meher, Co-Founder & CEO of Witworks, India
Blink smartwatch is available for pre-order from today i.e September 30th at a steep price of Rs 12,999 from online store of Witworks. It will begin shipping sometime in November.