For a category that hasn't quite turned the cornet yet, the announcement from China's Ingenic Semiconductor regarding its development kit for wearables with a MIPS-based CPU is welcome news. The company has released a computer, approximately the size of an SD card, that supports a full version of Android and includes Flash, Wi-Fi, NFC and various sensors on a single board.
The news comes on the heels of Intel's announcement of a similar technology for the wearables market called Edison.
One of the major complaints with current wearable tech is battery life, in that here isn't much available. One of the promises with Newton is much lower power consumption which is key to long battery life. Newton is said to consume only 4 milliwatts in standby mode and consumes 100 milliwatts during MP3 playback. As an example of the extra operating life this brings to the space, for a category like smartwatches, this could mean lasting over 30 hours on one charge.
Additional features include 256KB of L2 cache, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi attachments, along with UART, USB and GPIO connectors. The board can support up to 3GB of memory.
While Ingenic Semiconductor hasn't announced the Newton board is compatible with Android Wear just yet, the feeling is it will happen sooner rather than later.
A company spokesman for Imagination Technologies, that developed the MIPS architecture, explained the strategy on compatibility.
"Android Wear is still in development so we can't claim full compatibility yet," Imagination's Alexandru Voica said. "We are, however, the only CPU IP supplier on the list of Google ecosystem partners, so the MIPS architecture is fully covered."
Despite the seemingly slow start the wearable tech category is off to, more than a few analysts apparently feel the future is bright.
According to a recent report from IHS Global Insights, the market for wearable technology - encompassing everything from new hearing aids to wristband pedometers - totaled almost $9 billion last year. The research firm claims that number should climb to $30 billion by 2018.
