Apple iWatch to arrive in October with curved OLED screen, blood glucose sensor and more?

There has been a slight pause in Apple iPhone 6 leaks as speculation about the Apple iWatch has taken center stage. Thursday, Cantor Fitzgerald's Brian White predicted that the timepiece would be unveiled, along with the Apple iPhone 6, in September. White also called for a $200 to $230 price for the wearable.

Today, we have some more rumors pertaining to the Apple iWatch courtesy of those anonymous industry sources. The timepiece will be launched in October, according to the latest speculation, and will feature a curved OLED screen. As expected, the iWatch will contain sensors for obtaining health-related readings such as calorie consumption, blood oxygen levels, sleep activity and blood glucose levels. The latter is a measurement used by diabetics to determine how much insulin they need to take. Given the price of the test strips that diabetics use for this test, if Apple does this right, it could have a home run on its hands.

According to an iWatch supplier, Apple plans on knocking out three to five million units each month. That is more than the total number of smartwatch-like devices sold for all of last year. Apple has partnered with the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic on the health side of the equation. It has also teamed up with Nike for the sports-related functions expected on the watch.

SILICON VALLEY -- Apple is getting set to move to its next stage of growth with a wearable health-monitoring device, hoping to establish a solid foothold in the promising healthcare sector.
The U.S. firm said Thursday at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference that it will this autumn bring to market an upgraded mobile operating system for smartphones and tablet devices. The new watch-like wearable gear will run on this OS, which will be equipped with a centralized function to manage users' biometric information via smartphones. It is expected to hit the market in October.

Though the details of services have yet to be released, specs for the new product are being finalized, according to industry sources. It will likely use a curved organic light-emitting diode (OLED) touchscreen and collect health-related data, such as calorie consumption, sleep activity, blood glucose and blood oxygen levels. It will also allow users to read messages sent by smartphones.

Apple appears confident of the new product. According to a parts manufacturer, it plans monthly commercial output of about 3-5 million units, which exceeds the total global sales of watch-like devices last year. This confidence is backed by its partnerships with high-profile hospitals -- it has teamed up with the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic, U.S. health institutes based in Minnesota and Ohio, respectively, to develop specific ways of analyzing the collected data and applying it to actual health management.

Apple is also in partnership with Nike. According to sources familiar with the matter, the two companies have likely agreed to integrate their services in the future. The sports equipment maker is expected to eventually pull out of the device business to concentrate on services.

Services keyHealth-monitoring services have been around for some time, but they did not really take off due to limited popularity. Google, for example, launched Google Health, a one-stop health-tracking database for individual use, in 2008, but scrapped it at the end of 2011. In Japan, Omron, a medical equipment maker, had a head start in the sector, but limiting services to its own devices meant it lost opportunities for service expansion.

John Wald, medical director for marketing and public affairs at the Mayo Clinic, attributed the low prevalence of health-monitoring services to a lack of easy-to-use mobile devices. He also pointed to insufficient coordination with medical institutes.

Apple is well-positioned to come up with an easy-to-use product due to its design-focused development capabilities. In addition, the new OS is designed to manage health-related data collected through platforms developed by other companies.

Apple expects linking to health-monitoring apps offered by others to gain access to massive amounts of data, such as heart rates, blood pressure, sleep cycles and calorie consumption. Though handling personal data requires due consideration, the analysis of big data can allow it to collaborate with a range of businesses in the fields of insurance, medicine, preventive services and advertising.

Rivals are also broadening their reach in the healthcare sector. Samsung Electronics offers an OLED pedometer that keeps track of the user's heart rate in addition to footsteps via an installed acceleration sensor.

Sony Mobile Communications is looking to offer lifetime support beyond health through its SmartBand, released last month. The gadget is designed to store all logs of a user's daily activity from exercise amounts, sleep quality to locations, weathers, phone calls the person made. "We want to help users enrich their lives," said a company official.

Samsung and Sony hope to parlay their early product launches into strengths against Apple, but when it comes to a market share of smartphones and the availability of apps, the U.S. firm has a distinctive edge, except pricing. Most wearable devices are selling for less than 20,000 yen ($193), but it is widely expected that Apple's new gadget will carry a price tag above them. Whether that is reasonable or not will depend on its functionality and design.

Apple has been criticized for having lost its spirit of innovation since Steve Jobs, the company's charismatic founder, passed away in 2011. Management has promised investors and fans that it will come up with a new product category in the second half of 2014.

Source |  Via and Seekingalpha

Why Apple's iWatch will sell better in an iPhone 6 world

We will not, indeed, see the first peek at the iWatch at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at the beginning of June, according to a report from John Paczkowski at re/code yesterday. “Sources familiar with Apple AAPL -1.07%’s plans tell Code/red that Tim Cook will not use WWDC to unveil Apple’s mythical wearable device,” Paczkowski writes. “Nor will he use it to show off a new Apple TV, or even preview the new software the company is developing for it.”

If true, this would be significant because, according to Stuart Miles of Pocket-lint last week, “Announcing an iWatch at the show, but then not launching it until September would allow the media, consumers, and naysayers to discuss, dissect, analyze, and be educated over a couple of months into why you would want a smartwatch and why you won’t be able to live without one.” But if Apple is not going to unveil the iWatch at WWDC, this same line of reasoning would suggest that there will be no iWatch this year at all.

This would be contrary to the rumor from ChinaTimes earlier this week the cites those notorious “Supply Chain industry sources” as saying that “Apple’s first wearable device iWatch components have started small production.” The story claims that the “advanced system in package (SiP) module technology” has been contracted to three suppliers, King Master, Southern Electric and ASE. It is not clear what “small production” (translated by Google GOOG -2.35%) means in this context. It would certainly seem possible for Apple to be preparing a small run of prototype devices to be distributed to developers and potential partners in advance of an actual ramp up

There are several very good reasons for Apple to not launch an iWatch this year, despite pressure from Pebble, Samsung and Google. The most important one is suggested by the iPhone installed base statistics from AlphaWise and Morgan Stanley MS -2.03% Research sited by Jay Yarrow at Business Insider. Despite the popularity of the iPhone 5 line, almost half of all current iPhone users are still on the smaller iPhone 4 line. As Yarrow astutely points out, “The iPhone accounts for 60% of Apple’s sales, but ~99% of what investors and analysts think about when it comes to Apple.” So despite the recent lackluster iPad sales, Apple investors are bullish on the coming iPhone, figuring that the larger-screen iPhone 6 will trigger a massive upgrade cycle. All of those iPhone 4 and 4S users and the earliest iPhone 5 adopters will be eligible for subsidized two-year upgrades on most U.S. carriers.

So with all of that pent up demand, why dilute the party with a new product line? An iWatch launch between iPhone launches might have more impact and create less confusion for Apple customers on how to deploy their “hardware as a service” dollars. Beyond that, the larger the iPhone gets, the more attractive a convenient, wrist-mounted controller becomes. The iWatch may well sell better in an iPhone 6 world.

The second reason to wait is that the iWatch is not just a new version of an existing product, like the next iPhone, but a whole new category for Apple. As Miles writes above, Apple needs to educate its users on why they might need an iWatch. Google Glass is a perfect example of the difference between a cool new tech product and the next big mass tech product. As Horace Dediu articulates on the Asymco blog, it is the difference between novelty, which is something merely new, as opposed to an innovation with is something new and uniquely useful. Apple is only in the business of making mass products, of making things that are uniquely useful. This would explain their patience with and underselling of its Apple TV product. But Apple TV is critically different from the iWatch because people already know they want to watch high-quality content on their TVs so the real barrier for Apple is the availability of that content, not the appeal of the product itself.

Another important factor is that as a new device, the iWatch will require safety testing by the FCC and potentially FDA regulatory approval if it is marketed as some sort of medical device. And such regulatory applications open to the public, ”meaning any product any company does submit will be all over the internet faster than you can say boo to a ghost,” writes Pocket-Lint’s Miles of the FCC filing.

The significant reason why Miles considered that Apple would reveal the iWatch at WWDC was the necessity to bring developers on board so that there are apps to make the iWatch “uniquely useful.” Could this mean that Apple will wait a whole additional year until WWDC 2015?

The final potential reason for slowing down the clock on the iWatch is that wearables are still far from attaining a coherent model. The smartphone, by contrast, is now quite a stable and predictable paradigm. I recently wrote that Pebble is winning the wearables war, for now, and what Apple does is now in the context of this early (qualified) success. I will write more about this in a forthcoming post, but from a survey of the iWatch entries from the Apple Fantasy Prototype League (#AFPL) it is clear that no consensus has yet formed. This is in stark contrast to the iPhone 6 that seems to have achieved a predictable form in the leak-o-verse.

For the iWatch fantasy designers there is no agreement, round or square, Fuelband or slap bracelet, one size or two? This profusion of ideas is indicative of the fact that the design space that the iWatch occupies is highly variable—for fanboy prototypers and Apple designers alike. Unlike phones, many people own multiple watches. So although the margins on the iWatch will be lower than iPhones, the potential number of units sold could ultimately be greater if Apple opens the product up as a platform with high-end branded manufacturing partners .

So, to recap, we will likely not see an iWatch on sale this year—and this is probably a good move for Apple. First, it will have it’s hands full with keeping up with the demand for the iPhone 6. Second, it needs more time to educate consumers about why they need an iWatch and more time to get developers on board to supply those reasons. Third, as a new product line, there is more governmental oversight than on updates to existing product lines. Finally, it is quite possible that Apple’s design exploration and testing have led them to the conclusion, mirrored in the world of Apple rumors, that there are many ways to make an iWatch and a single solution may not be the best solution —as inconvenient as that may be for the way it usually markets products.

UPDATE: The LuxVue acquisition that just surfaced is another angle on the iWatch story as Forbes contributor Mark Rogowsky pointed out in his post Friday and which Mashable’s Adario Strange gives more context for in his story Saturday. Certainly John Doerr’s tip at TechCrunch Disrupt that LuxVue’s displays “can be on curved substrates, so if somebody was gonna make a really great watch, you might want to use it there,” is suggestive. It could all be coincidental, but the fact that the company has a way to make very bright displays that use very little energy is intriguing for the iWatch. The real question is how close to market is its technology? It could be that Apple made the buy because it could not achieve the quality of display it wants for the iWatch at a level of power consumption that could work for the form factor of a sleek device with other available technologies. An abrupt pivot in display technology could be another reason for a delay, despite Tim Cook’s suggestion of new product categories on the way…