Smartwatch Archives

Apple submits patents for ‘a watch with a camera’

Jun 1, 2022 by Alex Baker 2 Comments

Who says the wristwatch is dead? Not Apple at any rate as they have just filed a patent application for a “watch having a camera” Yep, we have camera-phones, but now it looks like we may get a camera-watch in future. But don’t worry, it will probably be more James Bond than Flight of the Concords. Apple isn’t planning to actually glue a point and shoot onto a watch, they’ve come up with several different ideas for how to execute it.

One of the designs depicts the camera placed in the digital crown part of the watch (that’s the side button for the uninitiated), where it can operate whilst the wristwatch is being worn, which does seem logical to keep it out of the way.

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Beware: Your kid’s smartwatch could be spying on them through its camera

Oct 12, 2020 by Dunja Djudjic 5 Comments

If you bought a smartwatch for your kid, you may want to reconsider it. According to a recent alarming discovery, a line of smartwatches designed exclusively for children could be spying on them. A researcher has discovered an undocumented backdoor that allows a third person to access a camera, wiretap voice calls, and track your child’s location in real-time.

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LumiWatch is a projector smartwatch that turns your arm into a really bad touchscreen

Apr 27, 2018 by John Aldred 1 Comment

The idea of a smartwatch that could project a “screen” onto your arm with an interactive touch UI has been around for a while. But up until now, they’ve all either been vapourware or concepts. Now, though, it seems to be a reality, in the form of the LumiWatch, developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Although, it doesn’t actually look very good. In fact, it looks quite terrible.

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Sony’s new 2mm sensor could be coming to future smartwatches

Jan 2, 2017 by John Aldred 2 Comments

While some companies are trying to make the sensors in their cameras bigger, Sony are doing the opposite. They’re going smaller. Really small. Their new 2mm sensor is capable of a single megapixel, 1,296 pixels along the longest edge. Paired with a 2.6mm lens, the circuit that connects the whole thing to a device is also extremely tiny. The 20 pin connector is shrunk down to a minuscule 3.3mm. And the whole setup weighs just a tenth of a gram.

This sort of sensor isn’t all that useful for the handheld cameras most of use, but it does hold a lot of possibility for very small devices. Like smartwatches. These typically don’t contain any camera at all. Not even a front-facing one for things like Skype or Face time. Sony say the new sensor also boasts very low power consumption. So, it’s something that many smartwatch owners have been waiting for.

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