14 DAY TRIAL // HTC hasn’t been shy of sharing with us the fact that it has an interest in wearables. This is not a big shock, since most players in the industry have launched or are about to roll out several wearable products.
Back when @evleaks was still in business, we saw a bunch of pictures showing a purported HTC smartwatch make it out into the sunlight. On top of that, HTC was listed as one of the official partners for the Android Wear project, so we had high hopes a smartwatch branded by the company will soon make its way to us.
Sadly, the latest batch of available information reveals we can forget about HTC’s smartwatch. At least this year.
HTC says “Nay” to smartwatches
Speaking to Re/code in an interview HTC US President, Jason Mackenzie shed some light on the wearable dilemma. Is HTC going to launch a smartwatch soon or not? Well, we hate to be the bearers of bad news but the answer appears to be “no, it won’t.”
The company official says HTC originally planned to have its smartwatch ready in time for an August 2014 release, but due to a few reasons they couldn’t finish the project in time.
So what happened? HTC’s Creative Labs lead Drew Baford explains the company wanted to do it right and give customers a real reason to strap it to their wrist. More than that, looking around at today’s ecosystem, HTC doesn’t see anything worthy of consumer attention.
The device maker says they have seen a lot of general purpose wearables arrive on the market, but there is no strong reason why people would want to wear them every day.
No HTC smartwatch coming in 2014
Therefore, the company decided the best move would be to wait and survey the smartwatch market a little longer.
We’d have to agree with the company’s statements, as we told you in previous articles due to their high-price tags and limited functions, smartwatches today are more like accessories and not actually a necessity like smartphones have come to be.
Given the fact that HTC has been struggling to keep its business afloat, this move might not seem such a bad one after all. For the time being, the device maker chose to focus its efforts on its smartphone products.
Even so, general consensus on the street has it that HTC is the manufacturing company behind Google’s upcoming Nexus 9 tablet, which is expected to arrive soon bundled with a NVIDIA Tegra K1 processor.