iWatch 2.0: Why It Has Not Happened (Yet)

The iWatch 2.0 was a sure thing on my list of predictions for 2012. But it has not happened. Do you know why? I know, at least one part of the story.

As I explained a week ago and two weeks ago, there is one technology that is absolutely central to the emergence of smart watches. It is the Bluetooth Low Energy, or BLE. BLE is probably the wireless technology with the most potential in the consumer electronics space. It will be huge and everywhere. In future. Because it is not ready for the mass market yet. And you will hear a lot about BLE in 2013. But it will not be until the Q4 of 2013 until we will ride the BLE wave. The reason is, it is not supported by the Android OS yet.

BLE links peripherals (various sensors and gadgets) to a central device (a mobile phone or a computer in most cases). On the peripheral side it is just the BLE (a single mode Bluetooth Low Energy radio) chip. On the central side it is usually the Bluetooth 4.0 (a dual mode Classic / LE radio) chip, so the central device can connect both to a Classic (usually streaming) peripheral (wireless earpiece, speaker) or to a BLE peripheral (heart rate monitor, temperature sensor, cadence sensor etc).

All the recent central devices are equipped with the Bluetooth 4.0 hardware. iPhone has it since the 4s, and multiple Android phones and tablets have it as well. So where is the problem? As usual, in software. For an application to connect to a BLE peripheral, the BLE must be supported by the operating system. Which is the case on every platform but Android. Yes, BLE is supported by iOS. It is supported by Windows (since version 8). But not by Android. These are the facts.

Now some speculation of mine. The lack of support of BLE on Android is strange and there must be a reason for that. And the reason probably is the original Bluetooth on Android was based on BlueZ, which Google decided to drop and replace with the stack origianally developed and recently open-sourced by Broadcom. Per http://developer.android.com/about/versions/jelly-bean.html:

Android 4.2 introduces a new Bluetooth stack optimized for use with Android devices. The new Bluetooth stack developed in collaboration between Google and Broadcom replaces the stack based on BlueZ and provides improved compatibility and reliability.

The underlying reason was the inflexibility of BlueZ in handling profiles, which had to be implemented as device drivers, while the common need is to implement them in a more declarative way. But even though the 4.2 has the new Bluetooth stack, it does not handle BLE at the OS level API. If you go to the http://developer.android.com/reference/android/bluetooth/BluetoothProfile.html, there is nothing about BLE.

We are getting close. The likely date for the announcement of the BLE support in Android is the Google I/O conference, which is scheduled for May 13th, 2013. And then there will be the wait for the latest Android to filter down to the devices. Chances are the most recent ones, including the Galaxy S III and Note II will get the BLE upgrades. But the broad availability of the BLE handsets will not be until the Q4'13. A year from now.

This is really sad, having to wait for another year for this technology to arrive. And it is really hard to understand why Apple has not taken advantage of this Android weakness. With BLE present both in the iOS and in the 4s and 5 hardware, the watch - style iPod Nano should have already had BLE built in. Apple dropped the product instead, replacing it with the latest Nano that does not resemble a watch anymore. Don't they see the opportunity here? Yes there are rumors, Apple is working on a watch with Intel (why do they need Intel for a watch???), but they are at least one year late with that.