We've been hearing about a mythical Apple "iWatch" for a while now, to varying degrees of credibility, but this one from the April issue of MacUser magazine is probably the prettiest—and most plausibly Apple—interpretation we've seen.
The design was cooked up by designer Martin Hajek—who's done some spot-on renders for Gizmodo in the past—in close collaboration with the editors of MacUser. The goal was to make it something that they could realistically see themselves buying from an Apple Store, on a hunch that Apple would keep the design as "classic" as possible. The result is something far less visually offensive than some of the other concepts that have made the rounds.
Still, even a sharp-looking design like this highlights the difficulties of cramming iOS design language into a tiny watch screen, if that's something Apple's even doing. The weather and watch widgets look great, more or less, but check out that third panel, with the RSS/Tweetbot feed. Pretty cramped! There are ways out of that, like trimming down to a single feed on the screen at once, but that leaves you with a lot of swiping. We're still waiting to see something that makes sense of putting the sheer amount of information that makes its way through our devices on the limited real estate of a watch face.
Does a relatively pretty render mean that an Apple smartwatch is imminent? Not at all, no. But this looks far more believable as an Apple product than anything else floating around out there. [MacUser via Martin Hajek]