Qualcomm's Toq has what Samsung's Galaxy Gear needs. It has what Apple's iWatch needs, too, and probably what Pebble needs as well: butterfly wings.
Toq's secret weapon is Qualcomm's Mirasol display, an always-on, color reflective display that Qualcomm has pitched for years as inspired by the shimmering reflectivity of butterfly wings. (We have a more down-to-earth technical explanation from CES 2010.)
Mirasol solves a key smartwatch problem: heavy, hot, and power-hungry displays. When I put Samsung's Galaxy Gear on my wrist, it laid there like a lump, in part because of the stiff Super AMOLED screen. Color smartwatches in general also can't manage always-on displays with decent battery life, because AMOLED and LCD displays just take too much power to run continuously.
Like e-ink, though, Mirasol is passive, which means that it doesn't use any power when it isn't updating. It comes in colors, and nowadays it has a fast-enough refresh rate to show video. It works with sunlight rather than against it, giving it terrific outdoor visibility. And Qualcomm's inability to build very large Mirasol displays doesn't come into play when you're working at 1.5-inch sizes. This technology is perfect for smartwatches.
Qualcomm promises three to five days of use on a charge, which is a good sight better than the Galaxy Gear's single day. Sony promises four to seven days with its Smartwatch 2, which is even smaller and slimmer than the Toq, but it looks like its screen spends a lot of time off. The Pebble uses a dim, monochrome e-ink display to get decent always-on battery life.
Crashing Down To Earth
Butterflies live for a few months and then vanish. Toq may, too.Qualcomm has a lousy track record with consumer products. I can't think of a successful consumer launch the company has had in ten years. The company's Flo TV Personal Television got a hideous 1.5* rating from us in 2009.
The company seems to know this, too. Qualcomm exec Rob Chandhok explained to AllThingsD that "[a] success, for us, looks like our partners picking up and running with this. Qualcomm isn't turning into a consumer electronics company." But that leaves the question of who, exactly, would pick this up and run with it, and right now we haven't heard of any takers.
By making only "tens of thousands" of Toqs, Qualcomm neatly steps around the mysteries of Mirasol production as well. The company has never been able to produce Mirasol displays on a grand scale and in the kind of numbers needed to support a best-selling consumer device.
In 2011, Qualcomm decided to commit $1 billion to building a Mirasol plant in Taiwan, but that plan fizzled out. Instead, Mirasol toddled along, appearing in relatively small-scale Asian e-reader products. This May, Mirasol popped up at the SID Display Week show with a bunch of prototype displays years away from production.
Shortly afterwards, I got a confusing email from Qualcomm saying that "the next generation of Mirasol display technology is planned to be licensed while the current technology generation is planned to be commercialized with a focused and select set of strategic customers," which makes it sound like the company hasn't solved its production problems. I've been asking Qualcomm about Mirasol production for a year and haven't been able to get a straight answer.
Butterflies are beautiful, evanescent, and vanish when winter falls. Unless Qualcomm can answer questions about its Mirasol roll-out, the Toq is destined to the same fate.
For more, see our hands on review of Qualcomm's Toq smartwatch and the slideshow above.