Liu Jun, Lenovo’s Mobile division president has indicated that Lenovo is looking into entering the world of wearable tech. This comes as no surprise seeing that Lenovo is the fourth largest smartphone manufacturer and has been pushing into the mobile arena to make up for the loss of sales in the PC division. This is rather intriguing it joins the likes of Sony, Samsung and LG, indicating that as the smartphone arena being more saturated, more companies are shifting to wearable tech to get a slice of this emerging industry. It would also be interesting to see which part of the market is Lenovo aiming for, as Motorola, one of Lenovo’s acquisition could potentially be a rival in this area. In this sense, it would be better for Lenovo to target a different segment i.e. luxury or budget to avoid such a situation.
Another possibility would lie with the availability or branding in different countries. In the West, Motorola is rather well known and available, in Asia, Motorola devices aren’t exactly available. Lenovo on the other hand, is the exact opposite. In this case, building wearable tech to cater to different taste for both markets via Motorola and Lenovo makes quite a fair bit of sense as this would save cost and effort to market out to different audiences.
The platform in which Lenovo’s wearables launch on would probably be another determinant. Seeing that Motorola Moto 360 is based on Android Wear, putting Lenovo wearables onto a different platform might be a good way to diversify and stand out from the crowd. Having said this, this would require Lenovo to put in a considerable amount of effort and time to create a user friendly OS that runs on the wearables.
The increasing number of smartphone manufacturers moving into the wearables tech makes things interesting as it encourages innovation. Lenovo’s position as fourth largest smartphone manufacturer means that it possesses considerable resources in rivalling the likes of Samsung in this new industry. What do you think? Is the Moto 360 sufficient or would a Lenovo wearable excite you?