Hands-on with the futuristic Wove Band

Earlier this week we brought you the first details about Wove, a wearable that is billed as the world’s first truly flexible display product. Wove is the creation of California-based Polyera, a startup that is developing flexible electronics technologies, with a focus on flexible displays.

In our initial video, we looked at the underlying technology that makes Wove possible. Polyera’s breakthrough is a technology called Digital Fabric, which replaces the brittle silicon typically used to make thin film transistors (TFTs) with a novel, flexible material, making it possible to create durable flexible displays of OLED or e-ink type.

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Wove is an e-ink product, featuring a 1040 x 200 display that wraps around a segmented bracelet. The larger end segments contain batteries, processor, and storage, as well as the charging port and the simple clasp mechanism. It’s not exactly the most beautiful design we’ve seen in a wearable, but it doesn’t have to be. That’s not really the point of Wove, at least not in its current, pre-alpha stage.

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So what is the point of Wove? Polyera is trying to attract the attention of developers and designers, in order to create an ecosystem of “compositions” (or apps, as everyone else would call them) that can run on that eye-catching e-ink display. Basically, the company has the canvas and tools ready, and it’s hoping that developers will pick them up and create something special.

Wove runs on a modified version of Android called Wove OS, but we were only allowed to see a demo mode, which gave us a glimpse at the kind of functionality that may one day come to the device. Demos included a map navigation app, a recipe app, an app for media playback, as well as a look at the basic user interface of the device.

Polyera says it wants the experience of putting Wove on for the first time to be very personal, so they asked us not to take footage of the Wove being worn. Overall, it’s clear that, for now, Wove is an experiment, a pilot device designed to open the way for future products that are more refined and more compelling. But the concept holds great promise. Once you extract yourself from the conventions of “normal” displays, all kind of possibilities open up. Wearables are just the beginning. Polyera imagines a world where “devices are no longer hard, heavy, and cold, but soft, ambient, and organic.” That’s a bold vision to be sure, but there’s no denying that the devices of the future will be very different from our rectangular slabs of glass and metal.

Polyera plans to send out Wove prototypes to qualified developers by December, with a projected consumer release in 2016.

Sprint needs to cut $2.5 billion and jobs to save costs

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US carrier Sprint is looking to cut around $2 – 2.5 billion in costs over the next six months, according to an internal memo seen by the Wall Street Journal, which could result in a substantial round of layoffs.

According to the memo, Sprint’s new chief financial officer stated that external hiring will be frozen and that job reductions are inevitably on the way in order to help save on costs. Exact numbers haven’t been mentioned at this early stage, but Sprint currently employs somewhere around 31,000 members of staff. The finance department must now review and approve all expenditures too.

“We have begun an effort to significantly take costs out of the business so the transformation of the company will be sustainable for the long-term,” – Sprint spokesman Dave Tovar

The carrier has apparently been spending too much on acquiring and retaining customers, which has heavily hit the company’s operating margins.

This isn’t a new situation for Sprint either. The company managed to save around $1.5 billion in expenses over the previous 12 months, but this doesn’t appear to have gone far enough to help ease the carrier’s financial woes. Finding another $2.5 billion to cut so quickly is likely to be a much harder task. Sprint also recently announced that it would be sitting out the next major wireless spectrum auction, which will likely hamper the carrier’s ability to upgrade its network down the line.