The opening days of this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain saw two tech giants unveiling their new wearables that hope to compete with other smart watches in the market by doing away with a "techie watch" look and instead opting for a classic, elegant design.
LG Urbane and Urbane LTE
Being the third smartwatch to come out of this Korean company, the Urbane looks to be more promising than its predecessors. The classic-styled, brushed-steel look of the watch face is made more elegant by a metal body and stitched leather strap, swappable and thin at 22 mm.
On the standard Urbane is a 1.3-inch round P-OLED screen, displaying 320 x 320 resolution at 245 ppi. Powered by 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400, the watch comes with 512 MB RAM and 4 GB of internal storage, and the battery is rated at 410 mAh. Specs are almost the same with the Urbane LTE, although the RAM is amped up at 1 GB and connectivity is improved — it can connect via LTE, WiFi, and NFC.
Huawei Watch
This China-based smartphone company is now delving into the wearable business with the release of the Huawei Watch. The same with LG, makers of this wearable opted to focus on the timepiece as a design rather than a gadget. Having the same specs as the standard Urbane, this watch is much thicker at 42 mm, but comes in different colors — gold, black, silver — and different designs for both men and women.
Both wearables run on Android Wear.
According to sales data, only 720,000 watches running on Android Wear were shipped last year despite the hype about the launches of other smartwatches like the Asus Zenwatch, Moto 360, and Samsung Gear Live. Because of the marginal 2014 sales, the verdict is still hanging if these new watches will come out on top of other wearables like Pebble Time and Apple Watch.
