It's a shame the bracelet was so poorly designed. The thing was damn near perfect.
How the entire project fell apart is one of those "If you're in my neck of the woods buy me a beer" stories.
Thanks for the complement on the software. :) Having a chance to help design and build an (RT)OS at that young age and then have Microsoft of all companies, ship it out was an incredible experience. The underlying RTOS has some really cool and innovative concepts in it, and it was the best environment I've ever programmed for.
I might be biased about the programming environment, since I was designed or helped design most of the foundational APIs. :-D
as a tl;dr, 256KB of RAM, complete async runtime, CPU was off most of the time as the DMA (direct memory access) engine did the majority of the work copying data around. The closest modern analog would be programming in nodeJS, which funny enough is exactly what I'm doing right now!
honestly? That's pretty badass. I really liked the band concept and how it tried to actually advance wearables instead of smush watch and phone together.
Other things Band did:
1. Real true type fonts.
2. East Asia Language support
3. Real Unicode (see 1 & 2)
4. Antialiased fonts
5. Real transparency/alpha blending
6. Particle effects engine
30 FPS on a 96Mhz CPU and a dumb framebuffer.
Writing a custom OS lets you do amazing things with minimal resources!