Last week we caught wind of Allerta’s inPulse Bluetooth watch, that would receive notifications of text, e-mail, and phone messages, as well as alarm and calendar alerts from your smartphone. While I was hopeful that it would work with Android and Symbian as hinted at in early demos, they’ve announced the accessory, and for now it’s BlackBerry-exclusive.
Sure, the watch only works with BlackBerry, but since there’s a handheld-side application, it might simply a matter of creating new apps in order to get the watch to work with different smartphones. I would think such a port would have been much more seamless if they used native, universal Bluetooth profiles like OPP rather than requiring something proprietary running in the background to gobble up memory and even more battery life, but to be fair, I really don’t know the extent of functions that existing profiles provide; maybe a dedicated app will open up the watch to fresh functions more quickly than waiting on the Bluetooth SIG to provide new profiles. Judging from the graphics, it looks like Allerta is hoping to include twitter, weather, RSS and IM into the mix in the future.
As promising as inPulse is, I really hope RIM can man up and make their own – the Prada Link shows that there’s a lot of branding synergy with accessories like this, and that making something with universal connectivity is entirely possible. RIM already has the watch-side software down pat with the external display on the Pearl Flip, it’s just a matter of cramming it into a new form factor and dropping the finished product into their continually-growing accessory lineup.
In any case, if you’re already sold on the inPulse, you can get your preorder on with $149 in hand, and sit by your mailbox for it this February. You can also check out their blog for regular updates.