14 DAY TRIAL // When Apple finally introduced its much-anticipated Watch, not so long ago, the company talked about its brand new interface and also detailed how the smartwatch works and what it can do.
However, the technical specifications of the device were left out of the picture. We weren’t told how big the watch’s screen will be, what sort of resolution it will bring to the table or how much storage we can hope to find onboard.
At some point, Senior VP of Design at Apple, Jony Ive, took a moment to point out that the “heart” of the watch is a custom design chip which integrates many subsystems packed into one compact module, which has been baptized the S1.
Since that was all the information directly provided by the company, the folks over at Chipworks have taken it upon themselves to come up with educated guesses related to the Watch’s specs.
Under the hood of the Apple Watch
They argue the S1 is most likely a flash chip coming with a Wi-Fi layout. Comparing the few images of the chip they have managed to snap with several layouts, the publication came to the conclusion that the power source inside is most likely a Broadcom Wi-Fi module.
More details are revealed in a research note to investor written by analyst Timothy Arcuri of Cowen and Company. According to the writing, the Watch is expected to arrive with 512MB of RAM, which will put it on par with what Android Wear smartwatches offer today.
Arcuri believes Apple will offer a choice between 4GB and 8GB of internal storage, with the lower version being the base standard.
Broadcom apparently won the Wi-Fi battles in the Apple Watch
He also talks about the same Broadcom Wi-Fi chip and he even names it. According to him, this is the BCM43342 model which can also be found in the iPhone 5s.
In an interesting twist, the chip is known to include GPS radio. What’s puzzling is that Apple said in the presentation that the Watch will require tethering to an iPhone in order to offer GPS data. This means we might end up seeing a variation of the BCM43342 which lacks GPS.
Another major gray area when the Watch is concerned is battery life. Apple kept quiet regarding this topic too, but it appears users will be forced to recharge it daily/nightly.
The Watch still is a long way from being launched in the wild. This is expected to happen in early 2015 and when it does, it will ship out with a heart-rate monitor, Siri and Apple Play and a bunch of other cool features. But long battery life is apparently not one of them.