After recent leaks, the incremental upgrade is official
After recent leaks tipped the arrival of an updated Huawei Watch 2, the company has officially unveiled a 2018 edition of the smartwatch in China.
Essentially the successor to the Wear smartwatch that launched last February, the Watch 2 2018 doesn’t differ greatly to the original. The design is untouched, with the only significant upgrade being the support for eSIM, compared to the nanoSIM that the predecessor offered.
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This allows the user’s watch and smartphone to share the same number, meaning that you can use the device independent of your smartphone and make calls, receive texts and, well, whatever else you would normally do with your phone. This follows the lead of the Apple Watch, for example, which also lets users break free from their smartphone and go it alone from the wrist.
As for the rest of the specs, though, it’s a familiar story, as we say. The Watch will come packing a 1.2-inch, 390 x 390 circular AMOLED display, with Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3 protection on top of it. A Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor (not the next-gen Qualcomm chip set to land later this year) is providing the power under the hood, while it can also provide contactless payments through the built-in NFC chip and track workouts through GPS, a heart rate monitor, gyroscope, compass and barometer.
And while the eSIM support is the headline change here, there are also two new sensors on board. A capacitance sensor could hint at insights surrounding humidity or sweat further down the line, while the geomagnetic sensor should mean an improvement in its tracking abilities when you’re out in the great outdoors.
Of course, with this currently only launching in the company’s own territory, it’s difficult to know whether this is a true successor or whether a Huawei Watch 3 will land later this year, alongside the likes of the rumoured Google Pixel Watch. It’s also unknown whether the Huawei Watch 2 2018 will make it out of China at this stage.
However, for those interested in the slightly upgraded device, the eSIM variant of the watch will come in at 1,988 Yuan (roughly $310), while the nanoSIM model is available for 1,888 Yuan ($294) and the standard Bluetooth variant for 1,688 Yuan ($263).
