14 DAY TRIAL // Until now, smartwatches have mostly been advertised as extensions, of sorts, for smartphones, but if a new rumor is accurate, chances are that the LG G Watch is different from all its peers, or will be.
You see, a Korean media outlet has just reported that the LG G Watch will have its own USIM module, which will allow it to take calls.
This is different from how “common” smartwatches can establish a Bluetooth connection with a phone and act as a glorified audio system.
The G Watch will genuinely have independent support for voice calls, and LG U+ carries will provide the broadband coverage necessary for it.
Maybe later down the line other carriers will pick up the slack, but for now, we only know of LG U+ as having plans to release the G Watch in South Korea.
All in all, if this pans out, then the G Watch will essentially be a smartphone unto itself, albeit one featuring the form factor of a wearable electronic.
Also, the hardware won't be as good as the one that smartphones have these days. The wearability comes at a cost after all.
The screen, for example, with a diagonal of just 1.65 inches has a mere resolution of 280 x 280 pixels, while there are only 512 MB of RAM available for the Android Wear OS to operate on. Then, there's the built-in storage: a relatively dismal 4 GB with no hopes of expansion.
No doubt, sometime in the future, smartwatches will have performance and resources on par with those of today's phones, while smartphones themselves will have advanced by a similar measure.
For now, though, the limits of the former are rather pronounced, so it's hard to say if the LG G Watch will win people over.
After all, the people likely to afford or have the inclination to buy a smartwatch probably own a smartphone already, so the voice call support will be pretty useless to them.
Nevertheless, there are worse ways that a product could make an impact. Arguably better ones too (Motorola's Moto 360 with round OLED display and magnetic wireless charging comes to mind), but a fair more bad ways this could have gone.
So, if LG was aiming to make its watch stand apart from all the others out there or on the way, it has more or less managed it. The Google I/O will only kick off on June 25, unfortunately, so we have a while to wait yet.