He’s a rapper, a member of the famed group Black Eyed Peas, a coveted music producer, rising tech and fashion mogul, and as of 2011 the director of creative innovation at Intel. Most recently, Will.i.am made headlines for a line of camera-enhancing cases for the iPhone (which were met with fairly poor response, from what I recall). Now he has taken his creative passion in a direction that is really generating some buzz with his new smartphone watch, a smart wearable that can literally stand alone, without relying on a connection to a smartphone.

 
It’s only been a week since we got our first glimpse of what I am dubbing the “smart.phone.watch”, and very little has been revealed regarding the details of the device. What we do know is that unlike most of the smart wearables currently available (Samsung’s Galaxy Gear, the Sony SmartBand, and the Pebble, to name a few), Will.i.am’s wearable wonder will be able to make and receive calls without a supplementary smartphone. In what appears to be part of a “give ‘em just enough to keep ‘em wanting more” marketing campaign, Will.i.am demonstrated the phone’s abilities in the UK last week on both the Alan Carr Chatty Man show and the BBC’s The Voice, showing respectively its ability to play music and make calls with a simple flick through a few (as of yet indistinguishable) screens. “I don’t use my phone any more. I just use this as my phone” Will told Alan Carr.

 
Several lucky audience members were able to snap shots of the demo as it happened, which have since been blown-up, zoomed-in-on and passed around the web faster than Pokemon cards on the playground. From what we can see so far, the watch appears to have a thick, bracelet/cuff-style design and a curved glass screen. Nothing official has been released regarding the software or specs of the “smart.watch.phone” (is it catching on?), but we do know that Will.i.am felt strongly enough about the project to fully fund it himself. “I started the company myself. I funded it, I used my own money to develop it. It’s a phone, it has all my music in it. If I’m working out I could work out with it without wires, with Bluetooth headphones. It’s got Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.” While these are the only confirmed details surrounding the watch, Mr. i.am seems to have covered all the most important bases (except text messaging – is that simply a given? The one thing it’s lacking? Ah, see- there’s that absence of info drawing me further into its curiosity clutches– well played, Will).

 
So that’s what we have so far – well, that and a couple of equally uninformative Tweets that subsequently followed his UK appearances. On April 4th he tweeted Engadget’s Emily Price to confirm that the gadget was, in fact, “really real”. A Tweet to Chatty Man Alan Carr announced the release of the gadget would be sometime in July – here’s hoping we get a taste of what else it can do before then.