ASUS Unveils the ZenWatch at IFA
by Brandon Chester on September 3, 2014 4:00 PM EST
Today ASUS threw their hat in the ring of Android Wear smartwatches with their new ASUS ZenWatch. All of the Android Wear watches sport a common hardware platform and the ZenWatch is no exception. It sports a 1.63" curved 320x320 AMOLED display, and is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 quad Cortex-A7 part running at 1.2GHz, paired with an Adreno 305 and 512MB of RAM plus 4GB of NAND. ASUS claims that the internal 1.4Wh battery will get a user through the day, and the IP55 rating for dust and water resistance should resist environmental hazards but not to the extent of other smartwatches like the Sony SmartWatch 3.
Android Wear watches typically have to compete on price or on design and build, and it looks like the ZenWatch has chosen to go with the latter. The stainless steel design with the curved cover glass and leather strap all convey a more premium feel than other plastic smartwatches. Of course, this also means that the ZenWatch is priced as one of the more expensive smartwatch options at 199 euros. ASUS expects that the ZenWatch will be put on sale sometime during the second half of 2014.
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mkozakewich - Thursday, September 4, 2014 - link
A 100MHz processor would be plenty. The Nintendo DS's main core was 67 MHz. (Now there's a device that could last a full day, too!)Honestly, I think we're losing the art of low-power systems. I'm sure there's middle ground between the year-long lives of the dumb watches and the day-long lives of smartwatches. Just what capabilities can we add to watches without draining the battery? Time-sliced Bluetooth? e-Ink (or even better transflective LCDs)? 64 MB RAM?
jordanclock - Monday, September 8, 2014 - link
I don't think 100Mhz would be plenty for anything like this. The SD400 is popping up a lot because it is the the best performing SoC for this form factor. I would say around this time next year we will see the for SoCs that are built for wearables, which is to say very small dual-core dies with possibly scaled back GPUs. I can't see CPU frequency going up unless some new function is found that no one has yet thought of.