HIGHLIGHTS
- The Blink is a smartwatch that is compatible with Android and iOS
- It runs a custom OS called Marvin thats based on Android 5.1
- It is expected to be available from November
- Smartwatches have not really caught on yet. Android Wear devices are rarely seen, and while it’s more common to see an iPhone owner with an Apple Watch, the sales haven’t been impressive. According to one Indian company, the problem isn’t in wearables as a category, but the approach that mobile giants took towards the category.
In Bengaluru’s Koramangala neighbourhood you’ll find plenty of startups, from companies that make Facebook bots to ones that make actual robots. In a co-working space across the road from a coffee shop that’s always overflowing with people making presentations and holding interviews, Gadgets 360 met with Somnath Meher, co-founder and CEO of WitWorks. The company launched as a crowdsourced product design platform, and released a product called Trippy, which lets you connect your old speakers to a Wi-Fi network for wireless streaming.
Since then, WitWorks has pivoted – it’s not a marketplace of ideas anymore, but a product company, Meher says, and its first device, the one that could make or break its future, is a smartwatch called Blink. According to Meher, the company decided that it wanted to build a wearable, and after considering different possibilities, decided on a smartwatch. The Blink is based on Android, but doesn’t use Android Wear – instead it runs on a highly customised version of Android 5.1 that WitWorks is calling Marvin.
“It’s forked from Android 5.1,” says Meher, “but we kept only the kernel and the hardware abstraction layer. We built almost everything else from the ground up. The existing smartwatches just bring the same kind of interaction that you have on the phone, to your wrist, and we felt that you needed to rethink the way people are going to use this device. We had to do something from the ground up.”
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