Samsung and Sony have smartwatches on the market. Google and Apple are rumored to have their own models in the works. And a few smaller companies have raised a lot of money on Kickstarter to launch their own smartwatches, ranging from the Pebble E Ink wristwatch and smartphone companion to the Omate TrueSmart watch which can actually replace your phone in many ways.
But things are just getting started, and it’s likely we’ll see many more smartwatches in the next few years, at least until we can figure out if there’s an actual market for them, or if they’ll fade away like a fad.
For now, they’re becoming a fixture at trade shows, and Charbax from ARMDevices.net spotted a few new smartwatches at the HKTDC show in Hong Kong.
Keep in mind, what you’re looking at are watches that manufacturers are trying to sell to device vendors, so the prices you may hear in the videos are the prices for samples or for large orders of 1,000 or more units.
A company called ZGPAX is showing off a model with a 1.54 inch, 240 x 240 pixel LCD touchscreen display, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, and a 1 GHz MediaTek MT6577 ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processor.
The watch basically has the guts of a cheap Android smartphone, and even makes phone calls. It runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich with access to the Google Play Store.
The watch supports Bluetooth and GPS, and has a front-facing camera. It’s said to get about 36 hours of battery life or 6 hours of talk time if you use it as a phone.
A company called Holawin is showing off a watch with remarkably similar specs, including the MT6577 processor, 1.54 inch, 240 x 240 pixel display, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage.
It accepts a SIM card and can make calls or connect to your phone via Bluetooth or the internet via WiFi.
Like the ZGPAX model, this watch is running Android 4.0, but what makes it a bit different is the custom app launcher which is designed to look a bit like Windows Phone, and which gives you a series of tiles on the home screen instead of your usual app icons.
When you dig into the app menu, settings, and other areas, the software is pretty clearly Google Android, and it actually looks a lot like what you get if you side-load a launcher on the Samsung Galaxy Gear.
gosh. shoddy – literally very cheap android phone guts rammed in a thick watch casing with as little UI customisation as possible