HTC Says Android Wear Smartwatch Still in the Works

The weekend announcement of the Grip, HTC’s fitness-tracking wearable, wasn’t too much of a surprise given its recent partnership with Under Armour, but it did raise an important question: where’s the Android Wear?

The answer isn’t quite clear yet, but HTC CEO Peter Chou told CNET at MWC in Barcelona that it’s still a thing. Sort of.

Said Chou:

“We try to be very careful instead of just putting out whatever, so we keep working on it.”

It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that the “whatever” Chou is referring to might be a veiled reference to a few of the less popular Android Wear devices to have come down the pike in 2014, namely the Samsung Gear Live and the LG G Watch. Both of those were first-gen Android Wear smartwatches, and both left reviewers pretty cold. Since then, LG has gone hog wild on wearables, with all kinds of different designs, form factors, and even operating systems. Meanwhile, Samsung hasn’t done anything else with Android Wear since then, and that’s not likely to change.

HTC, in the meantime, seems like it’s hard at work on its own Android Wear device, but the evidence to that effect is lacking other than Chou’s statement at MWC. Moreover, I’m more than willing to wait and see what kind of Android Wear device is coming from HTC soon, since it’s clearly been working on some pretty exciting stuff – namely the Vive. That’s it’s virtual reality gaming headset that was developed in partnership with Valve, and I’m betting it’ll be pretty big when the consumer version is released later this year.

[Source: CNET]