Taiwanese tech company Asus will officially be launching its VivoWatch this month. The device will carry a price tag of $149 and the one distinctive feature concerning the wearable will be that it will be running the company's Kood operating system instead than Google's Android Wear. According to the company's product page, Asus has stated that the smartwatch will be able to deliver up to 10 days of battery life.
Asus claims might be met with skepticism, primarily because the device carries a much smaller battery compared to the company's Android Wear running ZenWatch. VivoWatch runs a 123 mAh battery while ZenWatch is equipped with a 369 mAh battery. Since the upcoming wearable is running Asus' homegrown platform, perhaps it will consume significantly less energy compared to Google's wearable based operating system.
VivoWatch is equipped with a 1.28 inch black-and-white touchscreen that utilizes Sharp's memory LCD technology. This particular technology is able to embed 1 bit memory in every pixel. As a result, only that part of the image requires changing that moves around in the touchscreen, leading to a very energy efficient interface. Since a majority of wearables available in the market are running mobile SoCs which have been tweaked further to accommodate the size of smartwatches, VivoWatch is only running a microcontroller unit developed by STMicroelectronics N.V. The firmware itself has been developed by Asus.
Unfortunately, the drawback of using the smartwatch is that it will not be able to running Android Wear applications but will only sync data with phones running the following operating system updates:
- Android: version 4.3 or later
- iPhones: running iOS 8.1 or later
VivoWatch will officially go on sale in Taiwan on May 8, 2015. Afterwards, the product will be shipped out to other markets, such as United Kingdom, Germany, and other European countries.
