Could the dark horse smartwatch of the year come from technology savant will.i.am? The accessory maker this week appeared on a British TV show and showed off what he says has completely replaced his phone. Ditch your Note 3, your iPhone 5s; you don’t need a big screen and beautiful apps or cameras. Like will.i.am’s gaudy iPhone accessory, this upcoming smartwatch, which looks enormous, is designed to alter the mobile market as we know it. Put your smartphone up on eBay now, because you no longer need it.
Will.i.am hasn’t exactly had the best track record with hardware projects, but that doesn’t seem to have dampened his enthusiasm for buzzy gadgets at all. That’s why he showed off — what else? — his own smartwatch during a recent appearance on a British chat show called Alan Carr: Chatty Man. “I started the company myself,” he said before apparently tapping at a wrist-mounted touchscreen. “I funded it, used my own money to develop it.” The rapper-turned-entrepreneur is no stranger to tech (Intel named him its “Director of Creative Innovation” for reasons we can’t quite fathom) but we’d advise you keep a few grains of salt handy anyway. We get a very brief glimpse at a display that actually seems to work, though the phone dialing sounds and music that he supposedly played seemed a bit too loud to be genuine.