At the Wearable Technology Show in London, UK, MicroEJ® reported that Bong, a Chinese OEM, chose MicroEJ solutions when developing the software for its latest X2 smartwatch.
MicroEJ’s Internet of Things (IoT) product suite aims to enable design teams to build embedded software, design smart applications, and deploy them anywhere to any device.
The Bong X2 delivers time, heart rate and steps information to the user. The user’s experience involves no buttons or touchscreen, it is operated by natural wrist gestures. It has a 128×128 pixel 8-bit colour square LCD and runs on an ARM Cortex-M4 low-power microcontroller, which is said to make it cost- and power-effective.
Bong intends to use MicroEJ Studio to develop small features quickly through apps that are downloaded from the MicroEJ Application Store by owners of the smartwatch. Apps run over the firmware programmed into the smartwatch and allow users or manufacturers to extend the product capabilities after its purchase. The Store also allows creation of an open ecosystem of apps developers.
Bong leveraged PC and mobile developers to create the appealing and intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) of the smartwatch. Developers used MicroEJ SDK rapid prototyping and simulation tools to develop the GUI without the hardware. New features like a calculator app can be developed in one week instead of five, which represents a significant increase in software development productivity and enables creation of more apps that further differentiate the product and provide more value to the user.
Bong adopted a components-based architecture, which allows delivery of functions independently of hardware or firmware thanks to the MicroEJ OS virtualisation layer. 100% of the X2 application code can be reused on Bong’s next project, which eases the creation of derivative products.
The X2 smartwatch project took a total of four months from specifications to production, an estimated two times faster than previous projects, giving a significant time-to-market advantage to Bong and enabling earlier product sales generation.
“We are really pleased to work with MicroEJ,” said Sun Dapeng, co-founder of Bong. “The MicroEJ team was helpful in providing us the technical and business assistance that made the X2 project a success.”
MicroEJ exhibits at the Wearable Technology Show in London on March 15-16 and presents its software solutions for wearable device firmware and apps development on the show floor.
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