Huawei still interested in making smartwatches – looking for better battery life before continuing

Despite being around for a number of years, smartwatches are still a relatively new and developing product. A stale System-on-Chip (SoC) eco-system has led to stagnation in areas like battery life, and it’s this that’s keeping Huawei from developing a new watch.

In a post Kirin 980 announcement interview, Huawei CEO Richard Yu has spoken with reporters about Huawei’s future in smartwatches saying

We want to make bigger improvements and make the experience much better than today. That’s my target. We want to make the smartwatch more useful, more intimate, more functional, and with much longer battery life. Today we have two days battery life. I hope to have one running for a week. We want much better performance, and more usability.

According to Yu, on-watch AI processing could be the key to increasing functionality for smartwatches, though wouldn’t be drawn on a possible launch of a Kirin SoC for smartwatches.

The development of a new SoC is instrumental in extending battery life leading to a successful smartwatch. Yu said they had spoken with Qualcomm, who is expected to announce a new Snapdragon Wear SoC for wearables on the 10th of September.

Yu pointed out that they can’t increase battery size without increasing the size of smartwatches, something that has been a sticking point for many when it comes to smartwatch adoption.

Huawei last launched a new smartwatch at Mobile World Congress in 2017, though did update the watch with e-SIM support earlier this year.

There’s no word on when we’ll see a Huawei Watch 3, though anything is possible after the Qualcomm announcement next week. There are still a number of months until Mobile World Congress 2019 – an event at which we’ve seen the last two Huawei watches announced.