Chinese company iMCO Technology unveiled the CoWatch, the first smartphone that can be used with Amazon’s virtual assistant. An Indiegogo’s crowdfunded campaign aims at putting Alexa on users’ wrist, allowing them to order Uber rides, ask for traffic and weather reports and control their connected home right from the CoWatch, which will cost from $159 to $350.
iMCO claims that it is already producing 800 smartwatches and promises that it will ship them within three weeks of the Indiegogo campaign’s end. All others will be shipped within 90 days, according to a report by Digital Trends.
The smartwatch runs Chronological OS, the same team that provided the operative system for the Blocks modular smartwatch and received over $1.6 million in funding from its Kickstarter campaign.
CoWatch can connect with Amazon’s voice services to add things to shopping lists, control smart home devices, check bills and order pizza, similarly to the Amazon Echo connected the speaker. But talking to your wrist to ask Alexa to do all these tasks, among others, seems more practical than putting a listening speaker in every single room. When the Echo is out of reach, you can use the Alexa-enabled smartwatch since Amazon made the voice assistant available to third-party hardware makers.
Design
The CoWatch uses Bluetooth to pair with either and Android phone or iPhone. The water-resistant device has a round Super AMOLED display at a resolution of 400 x 400 pixels, a stainless steel and zirconia ceramic ring that can be customized by color, iMCO co-founder Eric Jin said. Users can also change the band to a leather variant, for example.
The smartwatch is built with a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage. It includes a step counter and heart rate sensor. iMCO claims the battery can last up to 32 hours on a single charge with an always-on screen and the package includes a wireless charging cradle.
Source: Digital Trends