You often see two types of products at CES: Those that will never see store shelves and those that will take months—if not years—to debut. LG’s recently revealed webOS-based smartwatch appears to be part of the latter group.
The upcoming wearable, which for CES was a collaboration with car maker Audi, is set to debut by early 2016, according to The Wall Street Journal. Rumors about a webOS-based LG watch first surfaced in October.
The story behind the story: Palm/HP’s webOS failed as a smartphone platform, but LG has done well with putting the platform on TVs. Smartwatches could see similar success for webOS, since the wearables are still in their nascent days and not yet dominated by Android and iOS. LG also appears to be creating a smartwatch that doesn’t depend on a smartphone pairing to be useful in the way Android Wear and the Apple Watch do. That could make the webOS watch different enough to attract a user base—especially if the company spends 2015 building a strong developer ecosystem for its wearable.
Scant details
Not a lot is known about the watch, but Android Central managed to track down the device on the CES show floor and confirmed it was running webOS. The round-faced device has a working name of LG W and looks a lot like a fancier version of the G Watch R, LG’s latest Android Wear device.
The watch came packed with a dialer, suggesting a future version will be able to make calls without the need for a smartphone.
There were also apps for calendar, email, listening to music, and an Audi app for locking and unlocking a car. LG’s unnamed watch is also made of stainless steel, sapphire crystal, and is water resistant (depth and time unknown). As for the innards, Android Central figures the webOS watch was using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 400 processor, which is a common component for other smartwatches.
There’s no word on pricing, but given the fancy stylings of the current prototype it could be a more expensive acquisition than the $300 G Watch R. Check out the Android Central scoop for a much more in-depth look at LG’s webOS watch.