The Huawei Watch may be the front-runner for best-looking Android Wear timepiece , but it could look a bit different when it finally goes on sale.
Yang Yong, Huawei's manager for wearables, told The Wall Street Journal that the watch will hit the United States and Europe in the third quarter, later than the summer timeframe that Huawei announced at Mobile World Congress in March . Huawei is also apparently tweaking the watch's design, with the Journal saying it will be less bulky, more akin in appearance to a classical wrist watch with a round case.
Last week, Chinese media reported that Huawei would delay the watch's launch until September or October, due to issues with using Google services in China. Still, it was unclear if this affected Huawei's launch plans elsewhere, and the company didn't respond to our request for clarification at the time. The Journal's report confirms a delay for Western markets, and also says the China launch could be pushed as far back as 2016 as Huawei works around its Android Wear woes.
There's no word on whether Huawei is making any changes to the Watch's tech specs, which currently include a 1.4-inch AMOLED display with 400-by-400 resolution, a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm processor, 512 MB of RAM, 4 GB of storage, a 300 mAh battery and a thickness of 11.3 mm. Yang told the Journal that Huawei won't be releasing a new smartwatch every year, so the company may simply be making some minor design refinements in hopes of getting it right the first time.
Why this matters: As Greenbot's Jason Cross wrote in March , the Huawei Watch was the most attractive Android Wear smartwatch he'd seen, with a round, stainless steel body that's not as chunky asMotorola's Moto 360 or LG's Watch Urbane. While those watches have a diameter of 46 mm, the Huawei Watch's 42 mm body should be a much better fit for small- to mid-sized wrists. It's a promising improvement for Android Wear on the design front, provided Huawei doesn't make any drastic changes.
