Omate Wherecom K3 first look: A smartwatch for the kids

The prospect of handing over a smartphone to your child is something that probably doesn't sit well for a lot of parents, but it's a crazy world out there and safety is a big deal.

Omate's Wherecom K3 smartwatch is designed for 6-10 year olds and has 3G built in so you don't need to carry around a phone. It's also packed with GPS and a bunch of handy safety features to keep a closer eye on your kids.

Essential reading: The best smartwatches in the world

It's not the first smartwatch for smaller digits and it certainly won't be the last we'll see. But with a decent $129 price tag, it could provide the most compelling argument that it's something useful for a family to own.

Design-wise, it's everything you'd expect from a smartwatch that's specifcally designed for tiny wrists. It's using Omate's TrueSmart smartwatch as the blueprint but the K3 is significantly slimmer with a bright yellow plastic watch case and a soft rubber watch band.

It's light to wear, which is obviously a good thing and the strap is pretty comfortable too. The 20mm bands are interchangeable if your kid absolutely hates yellow and is going to be available in a collection of different colours.

There's just two buttons on the side to flick through screens plus Omate has packed on a microphone and loudspeaker to take and make calls. That's possible because there's a micro SIM card slot included to pop in a 3G SIM. There's micro USB charging support here as well giving you a pretty standard two days of battery life.

Compared to some of the bulkier kids smartwatches out there, the K3 is slim, well built and actually looks quite nice.

There's a surprisingly sharp touchscreen display in tow here as well. It's a decent-sized 1.54-inch one with 320 x 320 pixel resolution. Responsiveness is slick as well with a dual core processor powering the performance.

Omate is certainly packing a lot inside this watch. There's GPS (more on that in a bit), Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. 8GB of built-in storage means you can store pictures and music, although there's no camera here. It's also packing a pedometer for the kids that don't like sitting in front of a games console.

On the software front, it's running Android Lollipop 5.1 with a custom user interface on top and it's really keeping things simple. Swipe through the screens and those icons fill up the screen. There's a handful of apps already preinstalled plus games can be played locally over Bluetooth with other K3 smartwatch owners.

And now for the features the parents will like. You can download the K3 management app for Android or iOS letting you track the GPS built into the watch to check in on the location. It also means the child wearing the watch can send out an SOS location alert that appears on the app if they get into some bother.

Fortunately Omate had loaned one of the K3 watches out so I was able to see how this works. Pulling up the app, you can quickly see the location of the watch and its wearer. Other safety features include a restricted phone contacts list that can be controlled from the management app.

That's quite a lot for watch that's not for grown ups. Crucially it's all about how well the K3's features are built into the experience and from what I can see it's looks like quite a smooth setup. The safety features really stand out here and while there's a lot of kid trackers out there, it could be the first one that has the tools do the job properly.