From EETimes: At the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week, flocks of unfamiliar vendors will be trotting out wearable devices: wristwatches, shoes, headbands, goggles, Dick Tracy cufflinks... you name it.
What no one knows is whether any of these wearables will turn out to be manufacturable in the foreseeable future, let alone become the hottest new gadget to take the world by storm.
Further, today's allegedly wearable devices might bear no resemblance to the wearable devices of 2015.
Robert Thompson, Freescale Semiconductor's i.MX development manager, observed that it's not unusual to find wearable device developers canceling their initial product plans within three months into development. They tear up the initial idea, redefine the product all over again, add or delete features (scale up or down the product concept), and come up something entirely different.
The cautionary message is that the wearable device market is still uncharted territory for everyone -- incumbents and non-branded OEMs included. Everyone's still scrambling for a winning formula and a definition of wearable devices.
Thompson nonetheless stresses that the wearable market is not a question of if, but a matter of when.
Indeed, in the age of the Internet of Things (IoT), a popular belief is that every object, or every human with a wearable device, will eventually become an end node of the IoT.
However, no one actually has a firm grip on how a truly popular wearable device might look, what its killer feature might be, whose (connectivity, sensor, power, and software) technology it should incorporate, and how units should be sold to which market.
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