Tag: smartwatch

Qualcomm and Google are getting together for an Android Wear device featuring the glittering crystals.

The next – or, more likely first – wearable technology you buy may be a Swarovski smartwatch. If the future Google and Qualcomm partnership is successfully designed, there may finally be a “smartwatch for her” that women actually like.

The majority of the details of this Swarovski crystal encrusted smartwatch will be released at Baselworld.

At the moment, not much has been shared about the Swarovski smartwatch. It’s assumed that the companies are hanging on to this information until the official unveiling this year at Switzerland’s Baselworld.

That said, a teaser about the wearable technology was revealed at CES 2017 by Qualcomm and Swarovski. Despite the tiny number of details, it has drawn considerable attention.

This will be the first Swarovski smartwatch in the hopes of targeting the female market.

Swarovski has previously worked with Huawei and Misfit to create devices for women. For instance, its crystals can be found on the Huawei Watch Ladies. That said, this is the brand’s first actual smartwatch in which it has partnered, not just added sparkle to another company’s product.

While it’s known that the wearable tech will use a Qualcomm processor, it hasn’t yet been confirmed whether or not it will be in the form of Snapdragon 835. That version was only just recently announced. There have also been guesses about whether or not it will involve an updated version of the Wear 2100 and if it will be unveiled at the Mobile World Congress.

Android Wear 2.0 has, after all, just been released as the first major revamping of the wearable device operating system from Google. That tech giant is clearly making some new moves in the wearable technology market as very few devices were launched with Android Wear in 2016. Moreover, the smartwatch market as a whole isn’t just performing below expectations. It is actually on the decline.

Still, Google remains optimistic and is believed to have its own devices to launch along with Android Wear 2.0. This could mean that the Swarovski smartwatch may be far from the only wearable device using an Android Wear operating system this year. It has yet to be seen whether it will be powerful enough to change the direction of the wearables market as a whole.

There are now tons of options on the market and despite tech company hopes, they’re not taking off.

As the holiday shopping season truly got underway last year, many companies predicted the launch of powerful wearable technology trends. Firms were unveiling devices left, right and center to ensure they had the chance to become the next big thing.

That time brought the entrance of the Apple Watch and Samsung Gear S2, major wearable tech players.

Lenovo, LG and Huawei all stepped in with Google to use Android Wear on their offerings. Each company wanted to add their own device to the wearable technology trends. However, a year later and well into the next holiday shopping season, it’s clear that consumers aren’t impressed. At least, they’re not as impressed as tech firms thought they would be. They’re certainly not ready to pay the hefty price tags for the devices.

Many in the industry feel that wearable technology trends won’t pick up until smartwatches become more convincing.

According to IDC senior research analyst Jitesh Ubrani, wearable technology companies have yet to give consumers a reason to want to buy. “A lot of what these devices can do, they’re essentially just mimicking the phone.”

As most people already have other mobile devices and certainly have a smartphone, there is little motivation to buy a smartwatch. Currently, people bring their smartphones everywhere they go. As the mobile devices are nearly always in a hand or a pocket, they are not considered inconvenient to use. Therefore, asking people to drop another few hundred dollars after already having spent several hundred on the phone seems too much for many consumers.

These unfortunate wearable technology trends have not been without their casualties. Pebble, for example, announced last week that they were shutting down. That company had been among the first smartwatch companies. It had a loyal following and was able to hold its own against the competition for quite some time. Now, faced with the Apple Watch and offerings from many other giants, even Pebble will be dissolving and selling its software to Fitbit; the leader of the fitness tracker scene.