DeAndre Cortez Way, aka Soulja Boy, aka Soulja Boy Tell 'Em has never returned to the career high of his hit Crank That (Soulja Boy). But Mr Way is a Renaissance man: rapper, producer, actor, and now peddler of knock-off smartwatches.
Soulja Boy this week launched his new line of merchandise, which includes games consoles (read: cheap emulator boxes), a smartphone and the SouljaWatch, a smartwatch that costs just $19.99 and looks quite a lot like an Apple Watch.
Most of the marketing material is just pictures of Apple Watches with "SouljaWatch" slapped on the screen. If you click through to actually buy one of these smartwatches you'll get to choose whether it ships from China or Russia, and whether you want a retail box or not. Nothing suspect here at all.
Read this: The best (real) smartwatches you can buy
The watch can allegedly do calls, messaging, sleep tracking, and has built-in GPS. It works with Android and iOS, and even rocks a 0.3-megapixel camera. But we have so many questions. What operating system does it run? Can we have one? Is any of this legal?
We put these queries to a representative on the site's 'SouljaChat' but at the time of writing we've had no response. Rest assured, we won't stop until we get answers.
Is it a scam? Well, Polygon has already done some digging on the SouljaGame consoles, which are apparently poorly rebranded emulators. We suspect the SouljaWatch is running on Android (the below video strongly suggests this is not Wear OS), and while Soulja may have done enough due diligence to avoid any legal hubbub, we wouldn't be surprised if Apple is on his case about those promo pictures before the week is out.
Anyway, here's a video of Soulja Boy previewing the watch.
https://t.co/LvcDFbVpPw pic.twitter.com/HvxPslJE9l
— Soulja Boy (Drako) (@souljaboy) December 3, 2018
"We're going viral just in time for Christmas," he says. Just not for the right reasons.
How we test
By Hugh Langley
Now at Business Insider, Hugh originally joined Wareable from TechRadar where he’d been writing news, features, reviews and just about everything else you can think of for three years.
Hugh is now a correspondent at Business Insider.
Prior to Wareable, Hugh freelanced while studying, writing about bad indie bands and slightly better movies. He found his way into tech journalism at the beginning of the wearables boom, when everyone was talking about Google Glass and the Oculus Rift was merely a Kickstarter campaign - and has been fascinated ever since.
He’s particularly interested in VR and any fitness tech that will help him (eventually) get back into shape. Hugh has also written for T3, Wired, Total Film, Little White Lies and China Daily.