Alcatel took what might be construed as a difficult choice with their own smartwatch, the Alcatel OneTouch Watch. Alcatel have used Android for a number of smartphones over the years and so it was something of a surprise when they announced a new smartwatch that wasn’t powered by Android Wear. However, there are a few reasons for this decision – it appears that Alcatel were aiming to bring a less expensive smartwatch to the market and so wrote their own operating system for the watch. Alcatel’s operating system is lightweight compared with Android Wear and so the device has lower powered internals. Furthermore, the Alcatel is compatible with Android and iOS devices that support Bluetooth Low Energy. In practice, this means the Android device must run Android 4.3 Jelly Bean or later and include Bluetooth 4 Low Energy, and for iOS, it needs to be an iPhone 4S or later running iOS 7, or later.
As far as sensors go on the device, the Alcatel OneTouch Watch contains the usual blend of sensors. It can report notifications from your smartphone, including calls, texts, Hangout instant messages, various social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, plus Gmail but unfortunately various features do not work, such as Google Now. You can, however, control your music app and camera from the watch via Bluetooth. It can keep track of your exercise, heartrate, steps and sleep and has a USB charger built straight into the strap, which when combined with two day or more battery life, makes the device easy to live with. However, until now only the black model has been available to buy with the white OneTouch Watch still showing as a “preorder.”
This changed today and now customers can pick up the white one for the same $149.99 price as the black model. However, at the time of writing the white color Alcatel OneTouch Watch is only available as a small / medium strap size; the larger versions are not yet available. The OneTouch Watch in white is available from OneTouch’s website. Those interested in finding out more or picking a new white one up can hit the source link below.