Earlier this week at Mobile World Congress Shanghai, Qualcomm Technologies along with Chinese smart device manufacturer, Xiaotiancai, announced a new smartwatch for kids, called the Xiaotiancai Z3. The aforementioned company announced that its products will transition to 4G network technologies, and the Xiaotiancai Z3 smartwatch for kids is the company’s latest product to adopt 4G capabilities, thanks to the inclusion of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC.
According to Qualcomm, the Xiaotiancai Z3 is one of the first kid’s smartwatches in the industry to adopt the Snapdragon Wear 2100 platform. The Snapdragon Wear 2100 chipset was manufactured on a 28nm process and features a quad-core CPU comprised of four 32-bit ARM Cortex-A7 cores clocked at up to 1.2 GHz. The chipset supports NFC, Bluetooth 4.1 Low Energy (LE), and conceals a Qualcomm Snapdragon X5 LTE modem. Having said that, the smartwatch takes advantage of 4G multi-mode and bi-directional calling and promises reliable indoor positioning through Wi-Fi, GPS, and 4G location triangulation methods. The official press release also states that the Xiaotiancai Z3 is the world’s first kid’s smartwatch to offer a swimming-level waterproof design. The internal components are wrapped in a metallic case featuring rubberized wristbands, and the product will be available in two color options including green and pink with black accents.
The Xiaotiancai Z3 is powered by Android OS, however, at the moment it’s unclear if the watch runs pure Android Wear 2.0 or a forked version of Google’s mobile operating system. It also remains to be seen what type of display it’s carrying and how many pixels the panel accommodates. Either way, the watch has been designed to seamlessly communicate with the parents’ connected smartphones and takes advantage of quick charging technologies, which should bode well with the wearable’s 4G capabilities. As far as availability is concerned, the Xiaotiancai Z3 is expected to launch in China in July 2017, however, at the moment there are no details regarding pricing or the smartwatch’s possible release beyond China’s borders. In China, Xiaotiancai is one of the first companies to popularize the kids watch segment which seems to experience phenomenal growth while transitioning to 4G technologies. It’ also worth noting that Xiaotiancai is a subsidiary of BBK Electronics, which is the same parent company that owns brands including Vivo, OPPO, and OnePlus.