Engineering:Sailfish smartwatch

Sailfish smartwatch project

Also known as	Sailfish watch
Developer	Jolla
Operating system	Sailfish OS
Website	https://blog.jolla.com/watch/

The Sailfish watch is a wearable devices that connects to a Sailfish smartphone and can display and control more functions than only time. It is not a production model, but a proof of concept study aiming to show that Jolla can bring Sailfish to many different shapes and form factors. The goal is to get it done on the watch and prove that the OS is well designed for smaller form factors and easy to navigate.

History and background

On 2 December 2016 the Jolla company presented the Sailfish watch project to show scalability of Sailfish OS, downsizing in this case. It was started to see what effects can be achieved using for this purpose Sailfish OS in very short development time. Jolla underlines it was started in previous month, November 2016, while achieved fluent effects seems to be obtained after years of development works.

However the hardware platform was not developed, but only Sailfish OS and needed smartwatch software. As a hardware was used LG Watch Urbane to launch developed software and evaluate effects.

The technical and design inspiration was taken from an existing smartwatch OS called AsteroidOS which shares a lot of the same Mer stuck core of middleware and Nemo libraries with Sailfish OS, this also shows importance and valuable support from the open source community.

The ambition was to stick with the gesture-centric approach, but that it's not ruling out the possibility of integrating physical buttons later on for a particular user needs.

Features and overview

Compatibility layer libHybris gives quick access to existing Android hardware, and prototyping features is a breeze on top of the high-level QML APIs to the home screen, connectivity, profiles, power management, display, clock, calendar, weather and settings backends also powering features running on Sailfish OS smartphones. In addition Sailfish UI layer provides a toolkit of scalable common components, gestures, layouts, animations, icons, fonts and localization enablers.

Fitness and health tracking is feature that in the fitness view allows to track daily activity levels (e.g. a dedicated step or a calorie counter). It could be extended to comprehensive health suite.

The watch can be paired with Sailfish OS smartphone, which can forwards calls and message notifications to the watch. User gets notified with vibration on the wrist, can glance incoming events, easily dismiss incoming calls with a simple gesture, or transfer the call to a hands-free set. In the prototype the connectivity is routed through WLAN as the low-power Bluetooth would have required more porting time.

See also

• Jolla C
• Jolla Tablet
• Sailfish Alliance – the open alliance of companies supporting and promoting Sailfish OS in frames of the open alliance.
• Aqua Fish – retailed version
• Oysters SF
• Fairphone 2
• INOI R7
• Liquidmorphium Turing Phone
• PuzzlePhone
• mi-Fone (mobile)
• MeeGo

External links

• Case study: Sailfish Watch: Official Jolla blog