HTC to Reveal a Smartwatch with Flagship Phone in March

It’s no big surprise that HTC will reportedly be unveiling a new flagship smartphone at the annual Mobile World Congress, or MWC, in Barcelona this March. However, Bloomberg reported late last night that the company would also have a brand new smartwatch on hand at the event to show off to the world.

According to the report, the smartwatch will have something to do with HTC’s recent announcement of a partnership with Under Armour and its fitness tracking ambitions. Unfortunately, the report has no other details about the device, so it’s anybody’s guess as to what form the smartwatch will take.

Interestingly, rumors of an HTC-made smartwatch have been swirling since last year. Mock-ups of a supposed HTC smartwatch appeared online, and not long after, some eagle-eyed Internet users thought they might have spotted said wearable in a promotional video. All the while, HTC has been relatively silent on the subject of wearables in general; the company’s cofounder said a year ago that they had been working on a product for a while, and in October they said that its wearable device wasn’t ready just yet. None of these non-committal comments offer us much insight into what kind of wearable we’ll see.

It stands to reason, however, that HTC will try to make things work using Google’s Android Wear platform. While the handset maker hasn’t made Android devices exclusively, it has seen the most success with those. It would surprise me to see HTC go with a homegrown operating system or even someone else’s. Wouldn’t the company want a smartwatch that could be sold as a companion to its many Android-powered smartphones?

On the other hand, HTC has been branching out into other realms of tech lately. A platform-agnostic smartwatch would help the company reach customers with any kind of smartphone. I don’t think it’s likely that HTC will stray from Android Wear – but it is possible.

We’ll see the wearable at MWC, if the report’s insider source is to be believed. That source also says that the new flagship phone – codenamed the M9, naturally – will feature a 20-megapixel rear camera, an HTC UltraPixel lens in the front, and will offer improved audio features, too. Again, we’ll get our first glimpse of that phone at MWC – so March should be interesting. In the meantime, if history repeats itself, we may see some leaks between now and then. Stay tuned.

[Source: Bloomberg]