The Android ar smartwatch space is getting a serious injection of swank at this year’s Mobile rld Congress thanks to Huawei’s Sunday reveal of the not-so-creatively-named Huawei tch.
ought from cold-forged stainless steel topped by a sapphire crystal lens, the Huawei tch borrows a number of critical design cues from traditional luxury timepieces, will inevitably go head-to-head with ‘s upmarket tch Urbane Urbane E, which impressed us the hell out of us during a hs-on.
icing the date of arrival of the Huawei tch is unknown, but it will be coming to the United States.
Dig the functional crown placed at 2 o’clock.
First teased (leaked? intentionally leaked?) in two YouTube videos posted on Saturday, the Huawei tch has a 1.4-inch round AMOD display boasting 400×400 resolution good for 286 pixels per inch. It will come in gold, silver black color schemes, along with a wide range of straps (I’m digging the Milanese loop in our lead photo), 40 different Android ar watchfaces (that’s a lot of options relative to competing models).
should get a hs on with the Huawei tch shortly, so for now I can only comment on what we see in renders in the YouTube videos—but what I see looks impressive. There’s a relatively thin bezel around the display. This helps Huawei more closely align with the look feel of a traditional analog watch. The Huawei tch also has strap lugs—another design cue that screams watch instead of gadget (see the Moto 360 for the other approach).
Yep, it has all the Android ar features you’ve come to expect.
And here’s a trick we haven’t yet seen in an Android ar watch: The functional crown button is placed at the 2 o’clock position. It’s just a little bit of flourish that imbues the Huawei tch with some extra identity. Inside, the Huawei tch is stard Android ar: 1.2GHz Qualcomm processor, 4GB of storage, 512MB of RAM. Ho-hum, sure. But in the Android ar game, it’s what’s outside that counts.
y this matters: Smartwatches have an image problem. Besides various technical roadblocks, such as poor battery life, most current-gen models just look too gadgety, which turns off analog watch traditionalists. But now with the Huawei tch, tch Urbane, the imminent arrival of legitimate Swiss timepieces stuffed with activity-tracking functions, the smartwatch market is maturing, nosing its way toward legitimacy.
Now let’s get this straight: The Android ar watches Apple tch won’t be direct competitors because their ecosystem lines are so clearly drawn. But when the Apple tch arrives with its rectangular display, it might already look outdated within the big scheme of smartwatch design—the more expensive gold Apple tch model notwithsting.
