How cool would it be if some big consumer electronics company that is really great at hardware design sold a smartwatch you could buy for under $100 that was open to any developer’s firmware?
That would be amazing, because as an open platform genius software developers could compete with each other to create the ultimate smartwatch experience, and they wouldn’t need to fuss with designing and manufacturing a physical hardware smartwatch.
Well, it’s happened. Sony this week announced an Open SmartWatch project that invites developers to create and flash their own firmware for the Sony SmartWatch.
This is bigger news than it sounds.
Sony is actually joining the open-source hardware movement. Sony! They’ve even published a SmartWatch hacker guide.
Sony has long offered an SDK for developers to write apps for the existing platform. But this is different — and surprising.
Sony’s Open SmartWatch project is massively good news for the following three reasons, just past the fold...
