By Chris O’BrienWith Apple’s stock hobbling and questions lingering about its ability to innovate in the post-Steve Jobs era, investors and fans are latching on to hopes that the tech giant’s next big thing will be the iWatch.While little is known of the mythical gadget that has recently become the hottest topic of Silicon Valley’s rumour mill, boosters envision a device that would let users read e-mails, Facebook notifications or caller ID by simply glancing down at their wrists.The smart watch, connected wirelessly to the iPhone, would tap the power of the voice assistant Siri to control music, dictate messages or get directions. Forget the wallet? Just swipe the watch near a scanner to make a payment. And as you jog home later, the kinetic energy of your movement would keep the battery charged while the watch measures your heart rate and the distance covered.“It would transform the whole smartphone business and the whole watch business at the same time,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst for consumer research firm NPD Group. “And for the better.”It would do all this and more. If it exists.For despite all the speculation about Apple’s plans, nobody really knows what features it might include, and when Apple might release it.And yet, this being Apple, such a watch, imagined or real, already faces monstrously high expectations. For Apple, there’s a big risk that releasing a watch that fails to dazzle, or that falls short of the iFantasyWatch people have in their heads, could hurt its reputation for innovation and raise fresh questions about the company’s ability to develop products without its late co-founder Jobs.Veterans of the smart-watch game caution that current technology severely limits the features such a watch could offer, not to mention the difficulty of getting a complex mix of specs just right.“Apple brings a lot of cachet to the conversation, but success in this category will be about cool design as much as technology,” said Bill Geiser, chief executive of Meta Watch, who has been working on smart watches for more than a decade. “You have a very small space for the device that is largely constrained. The design of any smart watch is driven by anatomy, and it’s driven by fashion and it’s driven by battery life.”There is no question that Apple is looking seriously at wearable computing, and most likely something for the wrist. In recent weeks, several news outlets, including Bloomberg, have cited sources indicating that such a product is on its way. The financial news agency reported that at least 100 employees are working on a watch.As is typical, Apple has declined to discuss any plans for future products. In the past decade, the company has filed applications and received numerous patents for technologies related to watch-like devices, including at least 79 that mention the word “wrist,” according to Bloomberg.In late February, the US Patent and Trademark Office revealed a patent application from Apple for a wearable computer in the form of a flexible bracelet that wraps around the wrist. According to the filing, that gadget would include a multi-touch display that would enable the user to “accomplish a number of different tasks including adjusting the order of a current playlist, or reviewing a list of recent phone calls. A response to a current text message can even be managed given a simple virtual keyboard configuration across the face of the flexible display.”Another patent, filed by Apple in 2009 and awarded in February, describes a “personal items network, and associated methods.” The patent outlines what Apple calls “movement” or “event monitoring devices” (MMD or EMD) that include sensors and transmitters and an accelerometer to record things like heart rate, pulse, stress, outside temperature or other environmental conditions. The patent includes a drawing of one such device taped to a person’s wrist.Putting this all together, an Apple smart watch could combine some aspects of a phone but also health monitoring devices such as Nike Inc’s FuelBand. And there are plenty of folks who are convinced that such a device represents a massive opportunity not just for Apple, but also for numerous competitors.“The combination of technologies naturally opens up the opportunity for a body area network to become a reality,” said Geiser, whose firm sells watches that work with both Apple and Android phones. “And the wrist is beachfront property.”Apple already has gotten a glimpse of just how eager some people are for the company to make a watch. In 2010, the company released the sixth generation of its iPod Nano that shrank the device from a long rectangle to a small square that was almost all screen. People immediately made wristbands to strap Nanos to their wrists.Scott Wilson, a designer who lives in Chicago, had been working on smart watches for years. When he saw the new iPod Nano, he thought “watch” and designed some straps for it and sold them through a company he started called LunaTik.“When they showed the size, and it was so small, it was interesting because all the smart watches to date had been too big and clunky to make it a mass market,” Wilson said. “With the Nano, it was like, ‘Wow, look what they packed into this tiny package.’”Last year, Apple released the seventh-generation Nano, which returned to a rectangular shape, undercutting its usefulness as an improvised watch. Wilson isn’t sure whether Apple wanted to stop a budding watch business it wasn’t ready to serve. But he said he continues to talk to friends at Apple who say a watch is coming — eventually.“It’s not a question of if Apple will do a smart watch,” Wilson said. “It’s when. Apple is good at not being first. They wait until technology doesn’t compromise their vision.”That was the case with tablet computing. Analysts have noted that the company was looking at tablets as far back as 2004. But under Jobs, Apple decided to put them aside, believing the cost and power of the components were not right, wireless networks were not robust enough and consumers might not be ready for touch-screen computing.That patience paid off when the company finally unveiled the iPad in 2010, not just the right product, but also at the right time.Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, in recent remarks at a shareholders meeting, seems to be indicating that Apple is still focused on making a product great, not just on getting something out the door to please investors.“At Apple, it’s important to us that we make products that customers not just like, but love,” Cook said.Because of the size and technological limits, Apple would have to make a number of difficult decisions about trade-offs.For instance, smart watch designers believe people want their watches to always be on for convenience. But that drains the battery faster. And because watches are also a personal fashion statement, Apple would have to decide whether to stick to its typical approach of offering a limited number of choices (a black or white watch?) or offer unlimited ways to customise the look.For all the geeky goodness that could be packed into a watch, Apple would also have to thoroughly understand what draws people to any kind of watch.Contrary to what you may have heard, smartphones are not killing the watch business. In fact, although the traditional watch industry has taken a licking in the last decade, it has done more than just tick.According to NPD, sales of “fashion and sports watches” (watches under $350) grew to $1.9bn for women and to $2.8bn for men last year — up 18% and 12%, respectively, compared with 2011.Cohen of NPD says this resurgence has taken hold in large part because younger consumers like the analogue look and feel, not because of new features. As an ongoing experiment, Cohen says, he likes to approach teenagers wearing a watch and ask them what time it is. They almost always pull a phone out of their pocket to check, he says.“The watch business is doing well because the younger generation is buying them as a fashion item,” he said. — Los Angeles Times/MCTTuning in across the world, via appBy Reid Kanaley You may be an Anglophile or a Francophile, or simply interested in news and views from around the world. Smartphone applications put international radio at your fingertips.TuneIn Radio, free from TuneIn Inc, comes in versions for devices of all kinds. Hear thousands of stations and millions of podcasts, from every continent, including the Web-station outpost playing folk music the other evening from windswept Snow Hill Island, Antarctica.Pick your stations on TuneIn by geography, format, or genre. There’s also a “trending” option to see what’s popular with other users. The $4.99 upgrade — a “Pro” version available for Android, Apple, and BlackBerry — does away with banner ads and gives you buttons that record and rewind programmes.“Car mode” on TuneIn puts just a few big buttons on the screen for easy navigation among favourite, recent or recommended stations.Nation-specific apps for iPhone by developer George Blu have names such as iRadio FR (for France) and iRadio Italia.On a free version of iRadio UK, choose stations from a map of the United Kingdom, by city or by genre. The genre “speech” is UK-speak for talk radio, on which, for example, an early-morning London host was arguing this week with an angry caller: “That’s rubbish, isn’t it? Rubbish!” Set a sleep timer in five-minute increments up to two hours.The iRadio UK app includes a player for Shoutcast radio, a platform for do-it-yourself Internet radio stations that pretty much anybody can set up.By upgrading to the 99-cent version, you lose the banner advertising and get an integrated voice recorder, as well as a radio recorder that stores to a Dropbox account. And the upgrade includes a “car mode” that offers a one-button operation and easy station-switching.Comparable Android apps by aor.leadapps include UK Radio, Punjab Radio, and BBC Radio — which packages broadcasts from BBC in the United Kingdom along with BBC Radio Asia and BBC World.Hourly News, by Urban Apps, is 99 cents for Apple devices. Each time you turn on the app, it begins playing the latest five-minute news summaries from a top-notch selection of sources — NPR, BBC, Canada’s CBC, the Wall Street Journal, and others.You can choose which of the newscasts you want to hear and, using a drag-and-drop list, change the order in which they will play.Radio Cloud Lite is the free version of Giles Chanot’s novelty Apple application that displays an international array of radio-station logos on the 3-D surface that you turn this way and that with swipes of a finger. A station begins playing as its logo comes front-and-centre on the screen.There didn’t seem to be much in the way of organisation in the free version, so I downloaded the 99-cent, no-advertising upgrade. With that, you get access to a menu of genres and countries. The instructions are to “select” the ones you favour. But what you actually have to do is de-select everything on the list that you don’t want. — The Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT