Rumor: Xbox Team Making Microsoft’s SmartWatch

The Verge has dug up a bunch of information on Microsoft’s supposed smartwatch. They have apparently confirmed that the prototype is being built at Redmond Studios and has been in development for over a year. They went on to discuss that the project originally started as a heart-rate monitor for the Xbox. No word on why that was scrapped in favor of the watch, but my guess is functionality. Imagine what you could do with a watch connected to Xbox Live. It could somehow interact with the Kinect, maybe call up your friends, it could be used to view achievements and other non-pertinent info. There’s so much more fun to be had with a watch then with a heart-rate monitor.

Currently the prototype, created under the same house the Kinect was, has a 5-pin magnetic connection. Pretty much the same tech used by the Surface tablet to feed power and data through it. There were also reports of Microsoft requesting 1.5″ displays from an unnamed Asian supply chain.

This is not Microsoft’s first foray into the smartwatch realm, as in 2004 they introduced its Smart Personal Object Technology. There were 2 versions of SPOT; one that relied on FM signals to acquire the weather and what not, plus another version that ran on MSN Direct which had a cost of $59/year.

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