As the proud owner and frequent user of a Pebble Classic, I am encouraged to hear about Pebble's continued success. With the sale of their millionth watch, the campaign of showmanship and big talk has begun. Will Eric Migicovsky and company be able to keep up with more premium smartwatch brands such as Apple or Motorola? I believe they will, simply by innovating with more platform/application support and undercutting all brands on price and battery life. Heck, with such bold talk of a new system framework in the works, we might finally see the wearable innovation we thought Apple was going to bring us late last year.
Windows 10 Will Be Raspberry Pi 2 Ready
In what will likely be the most expansive and tide shifting news of the week, Microsoft announced that a build of Windows 10 is coming for the new quad-core Raspberry Pi 2, which was also announced today. The Raspberry Pi 2 also received double the memory alongside micro SD support and four USB ports. The entire package ships today for $35 just as the original Raspberry Pi did nearly three years ago.
Raspberry Pi has been a valuable education tool since introduction. With the addition of a Windows 10 compatible model, teachers will now be able to teach their students computer interaction and development concepts on a platform they are both familiar with and can use on a regular basis. Now a child can compile their sample code and take it home to use on their family PC. Such a step will bring pride and intrigue to the surface of many students.
Makers, the bread and butter of the modern technology movement, are going to run with the new expanded Input/Output capabilities of the Raspberry Pi 2 and will also be able to use the full software stack that has made Microsoft so popular amongst enterprise users and developers. Code which runs as a simple task on a Raspberry Pi 2 can also run seamlessly run on any PC with Windows 10 thanks to the universal app framework introduced by Microsoft last month.
What makes this so interesting is how little was know and is still not known about this announcement. Signs point to strong positive influence and bolstering of a number communities in the technology world that desperately needed the validation of Microsoft. The humble Raspberry Pi Foundation and the software and services behemoth of Microsoft managed to hide their secret relationship in order to surprise educators and makers around the world. I'm sure Microsoft Build 2015 will hold many juicy details details about Windows 10's future on connected systems such as the Raspberry Pi and other modern connected systems.