According to a report that surfaced earlier today, LG, Huawei, and Lenovo aren’t planning on releasing any new smartwatches in 2016. Out of the three prominent Android Wear hardware manufacturers, only LG launched a new smartwatch since the turn of the year, the LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE.
Sources with knowledge of the matter provided the information to CNET and stated that the aforementioned companies have decided to postpone the release of any new smartwatches until 2017 due to several reasons. Most importantly, the smartwatch business simply isn’t that profitable at the moment as the industry has yet to attract average consumers. Most owners and potential buyers of smartwatches today are young males and pretty much everyone agrees that needs to change for the business to move forward. Secondly, manufacturers are still figuring out how to significantly improve the next generation of their devices. The currently biggest issue in this regard, is the process of integrating an LTE radio into new watches as the industry is still on the lookout for an affordable way to accomplish that without shipping a robust and power-hungry device.
This latest report surfaced after numerous media outlets started questioning why the three manufacturers did not make any new smartwatch announcements during the recently held IFA 2016 event. As the Berlin-based event is the place where LG, Lenovo, and Huawei had been somewhat expected to announce a new smartwatch, it was surprising to see that Huawei didn’t reveal a successor to the Huawei Watch and Motorola didn’t say anything about the third iteration of its Moto 360 wearable. What makes the timing even more curious is that Google is in the process of wrapping up development on Android Wear 2.0 which is slated for release in the next few months and could definitely benefit from having new hardware to run the operating system on. Of course, there is the rumor that Google is likely to release its very own smartwatch in the near future, but the lack of options when it comes to brand new Android Wear devices certainly won’t help the platform compete with the likes of the Apple Watch 2 and Samsung’s Gear S3.