With a battery life said to allow roaming away from chargers up to two days, Microsoft's rumored smart watch would put it ahead of the latest offerings from Samsung and in front of Apple's power-hungry watch. That's if the wearable tech the company is preparing is, in fact, a watch.
While Microsoft prides itself on resting ahead of the cloud curve, any entry in the smart watch sector at this point puts the company on the back side of a hill that's being climbed by the top names in mobile device development. In the smart watch's favor would be its alleged impending release date.
Information obtained by Forbes indicates Microsoft is planning to unwrap a smart watch in just a few weeks. Sources told Forbes the smart watch will offer compatibility with multiple mobile platforms. It's unclear what platform the watch itself would run on, but Microsoft's aggressive push for its Windows Phone 8.1 OS is an indicator of the software on which the wearable tech will run.
Microsoft has declined to comment on a rumored smart watch, but sources told the Verge the tech company is preparing to release a more of a smart band with a few smart watch features.
Both reports indicate the wearable tech will include a heart rate monitor and will track standard fitness metrics, such as calories burned and steps taken. The release of a smart band would jibe with reports that the wearable tech offers two days of battery life, a feat that has been longed for by consumers and out of reach by manufacturers.
Microsoft is said to have commissioned engineers from its Xbox division to develop optical tech similar to that used by the console's Kinect sensor. The optical tech would likely be implemented on the underside of a smart watch or band to track heart rate, even as the wearer slept.
To bring it all together, whatever it is exactly, Microsoft's Azure cloud servers and their machine-learning abilities would provide the backbone for a health platform to manage biometrics collected by the smart watch or band.
At a recent event in San Francisco, Microsoft's top executives delivered a brief on its cloud strategy and sang the company's summer song of "mobile first, cloud first" in detailing its strategy.
While a large part of the event focused on the delivery of prebuilt cloud servers, Microsoft stressed its efforts to connect devices of any platform to Azure. Along with agreeing on the heart rate monitor, both reports on Microsoft's inbound wearable jibe on claims that the device will be platform-agnostic.
