This company brings 4G LTE to kid’s watch, and you may never heard of them
Not many smartwatch is capable of making calls and data connection independent of a smartphone, mostly have to be paired with a smartphone to make calls through bluetooth. However, in the Kid’s smart watch category, it is common to have its own SIM card and make calls from the watch itself. Such wireless network ready watches are so-called smart watch for kids, not quite popular in US, but very popular in China and other Asia countries, where child kidnapping is a more frequent crime than other countries, thus spur the demand for a smartwatch to locate whereabouts of the kids, and also make calls to the kids without using phones.
From 2014, smart watches started gain traction and consumer adoption in China. Millions of products, produced by hundreds of brands, ranging from small shops to top players like Huawei. All of them are developed based on feature phone platforms, unlike smart watch made for adults, which would be based on Android.
However, a startup is aimed at changing that, and brings smartphone operating system and hardware configurations to smart watch for kids. Kido Watch, produced by a stealth startup named Shanghai Artimen Network Technologies, is the world’s first Smart Watch for Kids that is capable of 4G LTE.
Kido Watch is announced last week in Beijing by Kido team together with LeEco, which is an ambitious Internet giant who is now building its massive LeEco hardware and content ecosystem. Kido Watch is its first serious attempt into the Kids’ device and education market. Millions of Chinese parents spend billions yuan for kids every year, and they certainly hope Kido could be the brand that make sense to the kids community where as LeEco is the brand for the family.
Technology Advance
The Kido team developed the smart watch with a Qualcomm 8909 chipset, which is usually used in mid to low end smartphone, capable of 4G LTE connections, and supports all operators in China. So kids can make and receive calls directly from the watch, after bundled with parents’ smartphone through mobile app. The mobile app was only to add numbers and entries to the smart watch since it lacks a form of input, and also a secure way to add white-list to smartwatch, and block all other calls except that of parents.
Like other kids’ smart watch in the past 2 years, it also support location tracking and messaging. Location tracking usually uses GPS, LBS and Wifi location services, and it accuracy is depended on the performance of hardware and antenna, as well as physical environment.
Kido Watch also bring artificial intelligence to the kids’ watch category, it does connected to top-tier voice recognition and speech processing system, as well as a massive knowledge base to answer questions by serious and curious kids.
Not only they designed this watch with superior hardware configurations with intention to make it is capable of handling curious kids, they also designed the GUI in favor of the view by kids. By the way, Kido Watch also claimed the world’s first cartoon UI.
The entire interface on Kido Watch is replaced by animations and cartoon figures instead of menu trees and icons, the purpose is to make it simple for kid to navigate. They didn’t just create animations, they also create a cartoon figure and its family members, which are used throughout the UI as well as commercials.
Kido Watch is priced at CNY 698, around $105 in today’s exchange rate. It is, however, only available in China for this time, comment below if you are interested in this type of watch for your kids.
