14 DAY TRIAL // Today, we told you HTC was expected to release its first Android Wear product, in the form of a smartwatch somewhere in late August or early September.
It turns out, the end of the week also brings us news of Acer’s first wearable. Unlike the HTC device, this is going to be a health-centric wrist band, in the vein of Samsung’s Gear Fit.
PC Advisor reports Acer is going to name the wearable Liquid Leap and will equip it with a rubberized band and award it with a set of basic controls and notifications.
The gadget will be capable of doing what most fitness bands do these days, meaning they can track walked distance or burned calories. Furthermore, it give wearers the opportunity to control the music via the smartphone app.
That’s right, you’ll have to pair the device with a smartphone for it to be of any use to you. The caveat is, Acer will not be letting users of other smartphone jump on board of the Liquid Leap bandwagon.
The wearable will be offered exclusively in a bundle with the Liquid Jade smartphone. This will certainly put a big damper on sales, but Acer is probably hoping to make the new smartphone more attractive to customers.
The fitness band is also capable of relaying notifications including those for incoming calls and text messages on its relatively cramped screen of 1-inch.
Acer is expected to announce the product in the days before the Computex trade show kicks off in Taiwan next week. A prototype was already put on display in late April during the tech giant’s press event that took place in New York.
We don’t know anything about the pricing specifications of the devices, but we can tell you the Liquid Leap will be targeted at developing markets to begin with (in Q3) and will only make it on the US market at a later date.
As for the Liquid Jade smartphone, the device arrives with a 5-inch HD display and ships with Android 4.4. KitKat out of the box. Under the hood lies the powerhouse in the form of a quad-core MediaTek processor fitted with 8GB of RAM.
Other specifications include two cameras (a pretty capable 13MP one living in the front and a 2MP one on the back), Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0.
Acer is still struggling to gain its ground in the competitive tech market, so the company is striving to offer as many products as possible. For example last week, Acer introduced a set of cloud services under the “Bring Your Own Cloud” banner.