Intel Future Showcase: 2015 looks great
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Intel Future Showcase: Today
The future is looking bright
Intel had the very first Intel Future Showcase on Friday at the Carlton hotel and they invited us over for a look at what the company has that's coming to stores, will be coming to stores and might be coming to stores. Intel groups them into three separate categories; Today, Tomorrow and Future. We bring to you a sample of what Intel showed us earlier.
Today
In this section, we show you some of the products from the Today portion of the event. Those in this section are products that are already available or will be available soon.
Basis Health Tracker and Basis Peak
Earlier this year, Intel acquired the Basis, a fitness wearable maker. You might have seen something similar to the Basis Health Tracker (after all, fitness wearables are all the rage now) from other companies and in that regard, the Basis Health Tracker doesn't really have anything that other devices don't. The one in the picture above is the original Basis, which has seen been replaced by the newer one seen below, called the Basis Peak. Sadly, Intel doesn't have plans on releasing the second generation Basis here (it didn't launch the first one here either) and the only way to get them for now is if you import. It'll set you back US$200, and releases on the 25th of this month. The current editions don't run on Intel hardware, but one day, Intel might just be powering these wearable devices.
SMS Audio Biosport Earbuds
The SMS Audio Biosport earbuds looks no different from normal in-ear earbuds but they actually have a tiny sensor unit attached to each piece. It uses the RunKeeper app from your smart device, with all the data it records visible on that app. One interesting feature of the app is that you can actually set specific music to your heart beats. So if you're working out and your heart's racing, you could set the app to play 'Heart of the Tiger' as you work out. The SMS Audio Biosport is already available for sale online for US$149.95.
Intel Galileo development board and Intel Edison - Making Wearable and IoT development easier
The wearable tech industry is going into full swing with the first wave of of devices like fitness trackers and smart watches flooding the market and propelling the possibilities of tomorrow such as the bigger picture of the connected world with the Internet of Things (IoT) where basically anything and everything is connected to the cloud. To support the next wave of portable computing with wearables and IoT-like devices, Intel announced a new line on system on chip (SoC) products with the Quark family. One-fifth the size of the current Intel Atom based on the Silvermont microarchitecture, the Quark consumes only one-tenth its power needs. In the words of Intel, Quark is also "fully synthesizable with an open architecture, with an open ecosystem."
Seen in the above photo are actual development boards based on the Quark SoCs that allow basically anyone to develop ideas and products for the IoT or wearables segment. The larger Galileo development board comes complete with all the hardware features like Ethernet, USB, microSD and more which makes this more readily usable for development. It is Intel's first product in collaboration with Arduino. Arduino is a leading open-source hardware platform manufacturer for the hobbyist and education communities. More information of the Galileo development board in our earlier news piece here. Meanwhile, the Edison development board is an even smaller package that has a newer and faster dual-core Atom SoC processor, wireless communications IC and flash memory to make it a completely usable system on its own. However, it doesn't have the fan-out connectivity and hardware interfaces and thus if you're using an Edison development board, one would need to also design the hardware interface board. This is suitable for custom design solutions, but will of course cost more to get it going.
Intel shared that the complete Galileo development board costs somewhere around US$50 where Edison costs about US$60. As such, you can see why the Galileo kit is more readily adoptable for the purpose of development and testing ideas.
Intel Education 2-in-1 reference design rugged computing
Announced in April's Intel Global Solutions Summit, Intel showcased new low cost reference designs for the education sector to capitalize on the current trend of 2-in-1 computing devices. Also built for ruggedness, this new education tablet can revolutionize learning for millions of students worldwide. For more details of the system, tune in to our earlier article. While the reference design has already been deployed and is manufactured by ECS, we've not really had a chance to have hands-on with it till now:-
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