Remember HTC’s claim that it would bring its own smartwatch to market? Well, Android Wear has been available for over a year now, and we’ve yet to see HTC’s acclaimed smartwatch. To make matters worse, HTC’s fallen on hard financial times, having reported the worst financial loss in 8 years and falling out of Taiwan’s public company index.
The company is preparing to make a turnaround, even in its current circumstances. HTC is getting ready to join the Android Wear Circle with a wrist wearable that goes beyond the Grip fitness band the company announced at Mobile World Congress on March 1st that never materialized. This summer, HTC said that it would not release the Grip for sale but wanted to focus its efforts on something better.
The Taiwanese manufacturer has said that it’s working on a smartwatch codenamed “halfbeak,” which is a fish codename that matches other fish codenames for Android Wear smartwatches. From what we know right now, the HTC “Halfbeak” (codename, not the official name) will sport a circular design with a 360 x 360 resolution. We don’t know anything about the smartwatch design outside of this, but we imagine that HTC will do a metal design to match the design of its HTC One smartphone lineup.
While we’re sure that HTC has its fan base due to its metal design, Android Wear doesn’t really need more smartwatches that do the same thing. Since Android Wear is a smartwatch platform that belongs to Google, HTC, like Sony, Samsung, LG, and Motorola, are unable to modify their smartwatch UIs at all. It seems as though there’s little incentive to buy into HTC when all Wear smartwatches look nice with a circular or square design.
HTC is said to be ready for a September 29th unveiling in which it will reveal two gadgets – one could be the “Halfbeak” smartwatch, but the other could be a smartphone. At this point, HTC’s “Halfbeak” smartwatch could be unveiled alongside of a number of Android Wear smartwatches (such as the Asus Zenwatch 2) that were not announced at Google I/O 2015.
