Smartwatches are great. Smartwatches are nice. Smartwatches help us sleep better at night. That was a poem originally written by Dorothy Drangus(?!) In any event, smartwatches haven’t exactly set the world on fire yet, but also, Apple has yet to release or announce their own. Perhaps smartwatches should skip a tech step and jump right in to modular technology, another burgeoning super technology. Modular tech essentially means technology that can be put together and broken apart easily. Google just announced a smartphone called Ara that uses this idea. You buy a starter set for fifty bucks and then you can upgrade it piece by piece, like the insides of a PC but with the ease of a LEGO.
Now some industrious inventors are applying this idea to the smartwatch race. Introducing the appropriately named Blocks, a smartwatch made of several small blocks that stack together to make, well, whatever possible smartwatch configuration you can dream up. You simply purchase all the different accelerometers, heart monitors and voice recorders you want, snap them together and you’ve got a smartwatch that does exactly what you want it to, this also includes aesthetic choices like watchfaces and the like. In short, it’s a pretty cool idea.
There will also be a fully open marketplace for developers, should you want to create a block that isn’t included by Blocks(see what I did there?) There hasn’t been any word when they’ll be made available to the public but you can reserve one now regardless on their website.Â
