With yesterdays announcement from Acer that they will be planning to bring consumers the Liquid Leap smartband/fitness tracker wearable, it shines a little focus light back onto other OEMs from the region like HTC and ASUS on whether they plan to enter the wearables market soon as well. With sales on smartphones and tablets decreasing a little bit, the focus this year seems to be more heavy on the wearables side of things when it comes to our electronic devices. While plenty of other major manufacturers have already announced their plans for smartwatches or some other kind of wearable device, HTC and ASUS have yet to elaborate too in depth on their plans. Even smaller OEMs like Huawei have already announced their plan of attack for the wearables market.
While ASUS has been fairly mum about what they’ll be offering in the wearables space, they have let us in on the fact that they absolutely will be releasing a smartwatch later this year to compete with all the others. There weren’t many details about the watch, and while we can hope and suspect that it might run Android Wear as the backbone of the software, we have no idea as it was never stated by ASUS if that was the case. We know a couple key details, like ASUS planning to make the smartwatch very heavy on gesture and voice controlled actions as opposed to a strong focus on touch based control and navigation of the interface. They also stated that they want to deliver a smartwatch that is chocked full of features, and that they want to deliver a smartwatch like none other compared to what’s already out or will be out before ASUS drops their product. Unfortunately that is all they have said, and we have no real idea of timing or pricing for the device in question. Not even a name. Still, ASUS usually makes stellar products, so we’re looking forward to anything else they have to tell us when they’re ready to share more information.
HTC seems to be putting a lot of focus on their smartphones, and while there have been a few rumors floating around that HTC would in fact be bringing us a smartwatch or a wearable of some kind this year, they haven’t really opened up about anything. If they want to stay competitive though, they definitely need to release a wearable device of some kind, heck even a new tablet that catches everyone’s eye. If anyone could produce a stellar looking smartwatch that would function to near perfection, we’d think it would be HTC as they have great attention to detail. Hopefully we’ll learn of something more soon on what both HTC and ASUS plans are for devices in this particular market.