Citizen is launching a brand new watch except this time it’s not the typical timepiece you’d expect from the premium brand, rather it’s a smartwatch powered by Wear OS.
Citizen is one of the few companies that are actually still making new smartwatches with the Wear OS operating system. Fossil is the biggest brand and makes most of the watches that you see from other brands. Like those from Puma, DIESEL, Michael Kors and others.
Fossil also makes its own line of Wear OS smartwatches. Such as the recently launched Gen 5E. Then you have a few outliers like Suunto and other luxury brands. But for the most part, Fossil dominates this sector of wearables. Citizen though is happy to enter the wearables space. Though it does so with a watch that carries some underwhelming hardware.
The Citizen CZ Smart Wear OS smartwatch uses a Snapdragon Wear 3100
For a watch that comes from a premium brand like Citizen, and this late into the year, the CZ Smart comes with surprisingly underwhelming hardware. Specifically the mobile platform that powers the smarts.
The Snapdragon Wear 3100 is in plenty of watches. But Wear OS is already known for not having the best performance. Not all Wear OS watches are the same. But this is no doubt the sentiment you will hear about many of them.
Something to consider in all of this though is that no Wear OS watches with the 4100 are available yet. So Citizen isn’t offering a watch that’s really behind other Wear OS watches.
Pick this watch for the brand name and the style
When it comes to features and the rest of the specs, you’re getting something on par with other offerings.
The CZ Smart has a 1.28-inch AMOLED display wrapped in a 46mm case made of stainless steel. It’s water resistant, and comes with multiple strap options like most of the other Wear OS watches. Including stainless steel straps and silicone straps in various colors like black and blue.
You can also get the black and blue straps in leather. Not to mention the straps are designed to match the accent colors on the watch case. It has a 24+-hour battery life and 8GB of RAM too. So, pretty standard stuff. And you can have all of that for the not so low price of $395.
It does set itself apart though in a couple of ways. It’s a stylish watch. It’s also still a Citizen watch. So buy this watch for the brand name and the style. But keep in mind there are very comparable options in terms of specs and features for a significantly lower price.