Has Motorola Given Up On Smart Watches?

Not exactly. But Motorola does feel that the wearables market doesn’t have enough pull as of now.

Motorola is probably the most innovative brand in the effervescent world of smart devices. In fact it had the maximum number of patents to its name a few years, which helped it become attractive, and be acquired by Google. And later, Lenovo.

Almost always ahead of the game, Motorola exhibited this trait with it’s launch of the Moto 360 smartwatch (beating Apple to the punch) making the company stand at the vanguard of the Wearables market. In fact, the September 2015 launched Moto 360 was the first ever smartwatch with a circular design. This design and form factor was adopted by almost all Android smartwatches since.

However while being innovative, Motorola is also market savvy (perhaps even more so, after its varied owners’ sharp goal setting habits). If recent reports are to be believed, then we won’t be witnessing any new additions to Motorola’s smartwatches line-up in the near future, as the stalwart just made it clear that it isn’t making any smartwatch to coincide with the release of the next big version of Google’s smartwatch platform, Android Wear 2.
The current (second-gen) Moto 360 will receive the software update, however Motorola does not have any plans to introduce a brand new model at this time.

To refresh your memory, the second-gen Moto 360 runs on a Snapdragon 400 processor by Qualcomm and has a 300 mAh battery on the 42 mm watch and 400 mAh battery on the 46 mm variant.
It also has 4 GB of storage and standard 512 MB of RAM. The watch is IP67 dust and water resistance and is capable of many functions like displaying time, phone notifications, weather information, the number of steps taken, heart rate, a new watch face every day and of course tracks your fitness. The Moto Body by Motorola also syncs with Google Fit to give you much more data on your fitness.

Shakil Barkat, Head of Global Product Development at Motorola, said the company doesn’t “see enough pull in the market to put a new smartwatch out at this time”. Though there is hope that the company may revisit the market in the future should technologies for the wrist improve. “Wearables do not have broad enough appeal for us to continue to build on it year after year”, Barkat said, and pointed out that smartwatches and other wearable devices will not be in Motorola’s annual device roadmap.

Read carefully, Barkat’s statements and you might also conclude that wearable devices in general and smartwatches in particular haven’t been able to entice a lot of eyeballs and probably this is why a refresh rate in terms of new variants and features doesn’t seem like a welcome idea to many companies.

In fact, earlier this year, Motorola and a few other popular manufacturers like LG, Huawei specified that they wouldn’t be rolling out any more Android Wear-powered smartwatches in 2016.

We wrote a great article about this dilemma, along with our own opinion on whether anyone really needed a smartwatch at this time. You should read.

It is not that Android Smartwatches alone, are facing the brunt of demand and supply factors of the economy. Non-Android Wear smartwatches have suffered alike. This can be substantiated by the recent alleged reports of Fitbit acquiring Pebble for its technology and intellectual property thereby phasing out all of Pebble’s prevailing products.

The ever plummeting share of the smartwatch market (a substantial 51.6% drop in the third quarter of 2016 compared to the same period last year as per the IDC report from October 2016) is a clear indicator of the deep waters that the smartwatch market is in.

However, it will be sheer naivety to underestimate the value and prospects of the Wearables market on the basis of this decision by Motorola.

The same is also made clear by Motorola as Barkat, its spokesperson claimed that the “wrist still has value”, thereby dropping a hint that the company hasn’t altogether given up on the idea of making wearable devices or won’t release any devices at all in the near future.

Let’s just see how this pans out.

At Chip-Monks we honestly don’t believe that Wearables and Smartwatches have yet reached their zenith, but these devices definitely need fillips in some critical areas like technological, power-source and most importantly, USP, to begin making the climb up the steep slope of device sales.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.