By now you've probably come across rumors of the iWatch, a "watch-like device" that Apple is said to be working on. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg have all weighed in with reports that Apple is indeed moving forward with the smartwatch project, though no specs, features or release date have yet been offered.
In the absence of solid facts, then, there's plenty of room for speculation! Freshly arrived in the Captain Gadget inbox, we have two cool mockups of the iWatch from graphic designer Nickolay Lamm. Lamm -- whose work you might have seen on Gizmodo and Wired, among other tech sites, and who created these images in a post for the British blog MyVoucherCodes -- based his design on a couple of key Apple patents from 2010, namely this patent that shows a possible desktop-based icon interface for an Apple watch.
As the guide for his take on the iWatch, Lamm used the above patent, he told me in an email, as well as a bit of detective work he conducted. Lamm found that lead Apple designer Jonathan Ive was both friends with and inspired by the acclaimed designer Marc Newson, and so Lamm used Newson's watches as an inspiration for a hypothetical iWatch. Though some previous iWatch mockups have focused more on curved glass -- mentioned by the New York Times as a material Apple was indeed working with for its iWatch -- Lamm's rendering features a far less dramatic curve and appears more like a wristwatch we're accustomed to seeing today.
As you can see, Lamm's iWatch packs in several different app icons into a revolving semi-circle; it's inspired by the aforementioned patent, which addresses display "views [that] can be used to arrange a large number of icons for selection by a user."
Below, Lamm gives us another tantalizing possible feature of the iWatch: syncing with and control by a connected iPhone. In this view, Lamm imagines launching an application on the iWatch using an iPhone connected via Bluetooth or NFC. Connection between an iPhone and iWatch is one of the more common features expected by pundits for an iWatch; the Pebble smartwatch, released earlier this year, has already accomplished this, allowing an E-Ink wristwatch to display many iPhone notifications on its wrist-worn display.
Again, no one who is willing to talk to the press really has any idea what this thing really looks like, nor whether it will actually be released. As with most hypothetical Apple products, we are in the early, rampantly-speculative period of rumors. But it sure is fun to dream, isn't it?