LG may have had some trouble getting its LTE smartwatch out the door, but that doesn’t seem to have hindered pioneer Omate. The company today announced a 48-hour Indiegogo campaign to pre-sell its Omate Rise LTE watch.
The Omate Rise will run Android 5.1 (Lollipop) with a user-facing interface designed by Omate; the watch will connect with both Android and iOS apps using Bluetooth 4.1. The hardware is driven by an ARM Cortex A7 chip, and the 1.3-inch color display is touch-sensitive and shows 360×360 pixels. As previous Omate watches have done, the Rise will incorporate a 3G microSIM, GPS, and WiFi. The battery is 580mAh Lithium Polymer unit, and the watch is water-resistant to 1 ATM.
For 48 hours starting 10am New York time on December 7, Omate will pre-sell the Rise for between $199 and $219. The company says it wants to raise $30,000 to tool the carbon fiber bezel. The projected retail price will be $349. Backers will get watches starting in the end of March. Retail sales will start in June. [UPDATE: Omate reports that it hit its $300,000 goal in 15 minutes when the campaign went live.]
(Note: we are normally very wary of crowd-funding efforts from beginning manufacturers and ordinary don’t report on them due to their high failure rate. However, Omate, like Pebble before it, has demonstrated its ability to actually ship product in the crowdfunding and the retail channels.)