Casio Computer Co Ltd showed a watch compatible with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), a low-power consumption version of the Bluetooth wireless technology, at the 2011 International CES.
The watch, which is powered by the CR2032 button battery, operates for at least two years without replacing the battery while using near field communication, Casio said. It is the world's first watch compatible with BLE and will be commercialized within 2011, the company said. Casio had a demonstration of using the watch to communicate with a smartphone compatible with BLE.
BLE is part of the specifications defined in the latest (4.0) version of Bluetooth. There are a high-speed version and a low-power consumption version for Bluetooth 4.0, and BLE is the latter.
BLE mainly uses intermittent communication, and its power consumption is low when not in communication. The specifications are scheduled to be completed within 2010.
This time, Casio, which has been engaged in the development of the profile of BLE, made it into practical use for the first time.
For the demonstration, Casio equipped the watch with a chip supporting BLE communication and the smartphone with a chip compatible with BLE and Bluetooth 2.1 and transferred data between them. For example, when the smartphone received a call, the watch was notified of the reception and a message was shown on the LCD monitor of the watch.
The watch is embedded with an acceleration sensor, and an incoming call to the smartphone can be rejected by tapping the watch.
"The number of functions that can be realized by the user interface of a watch is limited," Casio said. "So, we let the smartphone take the main role and used the watch almost only for notifying the user of information."
The watch and the smartphone communicate with each other for about 10ms every 1.5 seconds. Several tens of bytes of data is transmitted each time.
The smartphone was prototyped by NEC Casio Mobile Communications Ltd. Its operating system is Android 2.2.
