Intel Shuts Down New Devices Group: No More Intel-Made Wearables

Intel this week confirmed that it had decided to close down its New Devices Group, which developed various wearable electronics, such as smartwatches, health/fitness monitors, smart/AR glasses and so on. The group was created five years ago by then-incoming CEO Bryan Krzanich, who wanted to ensure that Intel’s chips would be inside millions of emerging devices. While wearables have become relatively popular, their propagation is far below that of smartphones. Meanwhile, wearables made by Intel have never been among the market’s bestsellers. Thus, the chip giant is pulling the plug.

Over the five-year history of NDG, Intel made two significant acquisitions to bring necessary expertise to the group: the company took over Basis (a maker of fitness watches) in 2014 and Recon (a maker of wearable heads-up displays) in 2015. Most recently, Intel’s NDG showcased their Vaunt (aka Superlight) smart glasses that looked like “normal” glasses, yet used laser beams to project information to retina justifying their “smart” moniker. While NDG had cutting edge technologies, the group has never managed to produce a truly popular product. Moreover, when problems with one of their Basis smart watches showed up on a limited number of devices, Intel preferred to stop their sales and refund their costs to the customers rather than fix the problems and replace faulty units.

In the second half of 2015, Intel folded the New Devices Group into the New Technology Group, which was a signal that the company was hardly satisfied with NGD’s performance. Since then, we have seen multiple reports about layoffs in Intel’s NGD and have hear multiple rumors to axe the unit. Because making actual devices is generally unnatural for Intel, it was a matter of time brefore the chip giant was to pull the plug, so apparently it decided to do so this month.

Since Intel’s New Technology Group remains in place, all of Intel’s ongoing research projects for smart devices remain intact. More importantly, other Intel’s divisions continue to work on their products for wearables and ultra-low-power devices that will become widespread in the looming 5G era. The only products that are not going to see the light of day are those designed by Intel’s New Devices Group (e.g., the Vaunt glasses). Considering the fact that neither of NDG’s products has become popular, it is unclear whether those products are going to be missed.

It is noteworthy that Intel canned their Galileo, Joule, and Edison product lines aimed at the Internet-of-Things last Summer.

Related Reading:

• Apple 2017: Announcing a new Apple Watch Series 3, with Intel LTE/Cellular
• IDF 2014: Intel Edison Development Platform Now Shipping
• Intel Announces Galileo: Quark Based Arduino Compatible Developer Board
• Intel Announces “Quark” SoC Family: Tiny SoCs For Tiny Devices

The Apple Watch Series 2 Review: Building Towards Maturity

Back in the first half of 2015 Apple released the first version of the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch was a long-rumored product, often referred to as the iWatch before its release. At the time, it represented the best attempt that I had seen to provide a compelling smartwatch experience, but it was clearly a first generation product with many flaws. It was not unlike the iPhone 2G or the iPad 1 in that regard, and for all the things it did well, there were other parts of the experience that really didn’t deliver. While this shouldn’t have been unexpected given the nature of first generation products, when a device is surrounded by so much hype for so many years, expectations can begin to run wild. On top of that, certain aspects like application performance were not up to the standards that are expected of a shipping product. In our review of the original Apple Watch we concluded that it was a good first attempt, but obviously flawed, and that ordinary consumers should wait for future iterations.

The launch of Apple Watch Series 2 comes two years after the original announcement of the Apple Watch. Even when you consider the six month gap between the first Apple Watch’s announcement and launch, this still represents a longer time between versions than the yearly cadence that we’ve come to expect for many other products. Having a product in the market for one and a half years is a good span of time to observe how users are making use of it, what features they are and aren’t using, and what parts of the experience create friction. For a first generation product this kind of information is essential to make the necessary improvements in future iterations, as taking the product in the wrong direction could doom its future prospects entirely. Read on to see what changes Apple has made, and whether they make Apple Watch Series 2 a product that is truly ready for consumers.

Hands On With the Samsung Gear S3

For a while now the smartwatch market has been developing in fits and starts. One of the more interesting developments in this space isn’t Android Wear and watchOS, but Tizen and webOS as both Samsung and LG have turned to their own homegrown OSes in cases where Android Wear wasn’t necessarily the best fit. It seems that OEMs have increasingly decided that it is necessary to control both hardware and software to better differentiate their offerings. In the case of LG we saw the Urbane LTE which necessitated webOS to enable cellular functionality, while Samsung in most cases has been pushing hard on Tizen in just about every case for their smartwatches rather than Android Wear.

With the Gear S3, Samsung is continuing to push ahead with their Tizen smartwatches, and this time the Gear S3 is intended as a sort of companion to the Gear S2 as the Gear S2 is closer to 40 or 42mm in size while the Gear S3 is a 46mm watch with a 360×360 circular AMOLED display which makes for 278 PPI. The display itself is covered by Gorrilla Glass SR+ which is said to improve scratch resistance although sand is probably still going to scratch the cover lens. The big jump in size basically rules out this watch for roughly half of the population, but the jump in size comes with a fairly significant bump in battery. Like the Gear S2, this is IP68 rated but I wouldn’t actually try to use the device in a pool or shower as water damage isn’t covered and the IP68 rating is basically only for distilled still water for a depth beyond 1m for at least 30 minutes, which really isn’t enough to do much other than washing your hands with the watch still on your wrist.

There are also extra features like a speaker, and the Frontier model offers an LTE variant. While the Gear S2 has an Exynos 3250, the Gear S3 also gets a bump up to the Exynos 7270 but both US and Korean PR on-site were unable to answer what differentiated the two as both are 28nm SoCs with dual core 1 GHz CPUs. I would guess that the 7270 gets a bump to Cortex A35 or A53 but is still built on 28nm planar HKMG as it seems that it is difficult to justify the increased costs associated with either 28FDS or 14LPP/14LPC when volumes are not necessarily guaranteed in the same way that a smartphone is. Battery life with 28nm planar is said to be somewhere in the 3-4 day range for this watch, so I’m not sure people will really care all that much anyways. This battery life claim is with the always-on display feature, which is an innovation carried over from the Galaxy S7 and Note7.

In addition to the SoC, size, speaker, and other changes, the Gear S3 adds the ability to use Samsung Pay via either MST or NFC. In both cases it was noted that the phone itself much generate the token, so if you lose connection to a paired phone Samsung Pay will only work for one transaction on the watch. Authentication is done by entering a PIN when you first put on the watch and Samsung Pay is automatically disabled if the watch is removed similar to how Apple Pay works on the Apple Watch. Charging is still wireless. WiFi support is going to be limited by the nature of the device but 802.11b/g/n are supported as well as Bluetooth 4.2.

If you already know how the Gear S watches work there’s not much else to talk about, but this is actually my first encounter with the Gear S line of watches in any serious capacity. The Gear S3 in person is large, and basically is the same size as the Moto 360 in its first generation which was fairly large, but those with larger arms won’t have any issues. I haven’t really used a watch that big since then so wearing one again was a bit of a shock for me. The Gear S3 as a result feels a bit awkward and ungainly in size relative to the smaller Gear S2, but if your arms are larger than mine it should fit without issue. The design of the watch itself is impressive though, with delicate detailing that makes both the Frontier and Classic variants of the watch fit in with existing analog watch designs.

Other than this size issue the thickness of the watch is fairly respectable. The sheer size of the watch allows for the circular display to display a reasonable amount of information, and the rotating bezel remains a great way of navigating through the UI with a solid click between each detent. The side home and back buttons are a bit of a mystery when you first use them, but after pressing them once or twice you’re probably going to remember which is which. The watch is also fairly performant compared to something like the Apple Watch which is just slow by any measure. The Gear S3 also includes GPS and GLONASS support which is useful for things like turn by turn navigation and services like Uber. Where the Gear S3 allows for precise location setting and map zoom using the bezel, the Apple Watch version of this application is basically just a button with no real way to know what the pickup point is. I did notice some frame drops here and there but it’s hard to say if this was really the case without much closer examination and it’s likely that this isn’t final software.

Other than this, the only thing I was really cognizant of was the band design. Generally speaking these are generic 22mm bands, but Samsung by default seems to favor very thick bands for demonstration purposes, and due to the traditional band mechanisms I found the band to be somewhat uncomfortable compared to something like the Milanese Loop bands seen in the Apple Watch. Of course, due to the standardized 22mm design anything is possible for band design, but generally speaking this is something that OEMs should really be taking care of.

The Gear S3 comes in two designs, known as the Classic and Frontier, and of the two designs the Frontier will be the only one that will come with a cellular variant. Both will come with a Bluetooth variant designed to be paired to a phone. LTE variants will only be available through operators, which are currently AT&T, T-Mobile USA, and Verizon.