Xiaomi is crowdfunding a pair of '90 Minutes Ultra Smart Sportswear' shoes, powered by Intel Curie

Did Xiaomi actually launch a pair of…shoes? It would appear so, and these aren’t just any shoes. They’re ‘Smart Sneakers’ and they’re powered by the Intel Curie platform. The Xiaomi we see in India is a limited version of its Chinese version. Xiaomi sells smartphones, yes, but it also invests regularly in various startups and many of the innovative products in the company’s stables, including its drones, which are a result of these investments. Coming back to the shoes. Xiaomi didn’t actually launch them, but it has started crowdfunding the shoes and they’ve already surpassed their goal. Called the ’90 Minutes Ultra Smart Sportswear’, this line of running shoes detect what you’re doing with your feet, whether running, jumping or climbing, and presumably syncs the fitness data with your smartphone. Android Headlines reports that the Shanghai International Science and Technology Institute designed the shoes and that they’re designed for “professional athletes”. The base is apparently some sort of foam-like material that has an air cushion and an anti-bacterial, removable insole. The smarts are provided by the Intel Curie chip, which can be compared to an ARM chip of the type you’ll find in most fitness trackers. The Intel chip is different in that it uses the x86 instruction set, the kind you’d find in a desktop CPU. This SoC packs in a Pattern Matching Engine, a bunch of sensors including an accelerometer and gyroscope, a Bluetooth LE unit, 384 kB of flash memory and 80 kB of SRAM. Judging by the name, one would assume that the shoes will only track for 90 minutes, it’s called the “90 Minutes Ultra Smart Sportswear” after all, but Xiaomi says that the battery will power the device for 60 days. The shoes will potentially be priced at $43 (around Rs 2,900).