Does This Mean An Apple Inc. (AAPL) iWatch Is Coming Soon?

Tim Cook holding chartApple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has been facing a lot of pushback lately, and has seen some impatience on the part of investors, analysts and fans about the next, new set of devices that the company will be pushing out to store shelves. CEO Tim Cook went on the record to say not to expect anything new out of Apple until at least the fall, which would signify about a year between device launches, which would be a bit unusual for the company’s past production cycles.

One of the devices that was rumored about almost endlessly the past several months has been the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) answer to Google Glass and wearable  computing – the iWatch. Then, for a few weeks here recently, most of the talk and  chatter about this device has faded into the distance. For those of us who follow tech companies regularly, we could probably see what that meant – either the iWatch was a complete rumor from the jump, or the device is a reality more than we thought.

According to some reports out of Taiwan, it seems that the latter may be in order. The reports are still labeled as rumors at this point, but a couple of different stories from the same publication are indicating that a smartwatch is about to go into production and testing in the very near future. The device will reportedly have a 1.5-inch, curved OLED display made by RiTdisplay, and Foxconn has apparently been asked to start a small test run of about 1,000 devices.

So far, details outside of this re very sketchy, but the 1.5-inch display is reportedly smaller than a 1.8-inch display that was originally sought. Word is Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) made the decision to go smaller – as Tim Cook has said before, a bigger screen would not make sense if it was compromising technical aspects of the display (color, brightness, contrast, etc.) for the sake of size.

What are your thoughts? Do you think a smartwatch has potential in the marketplace, and what would you like to see a smartwatch do if Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) were to go public with this new device next year as expected? Let us know your feedback in the comments section below.

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