The road to market for LG Watch Urbane Second Edition LTE has been as long and rocky as the product’s name itself. The first Android Wear watch to be able to operate untethered from a mobile phone, it was supposed to ship at the end of last year but was held back for unspecfied technical problems.
Now that it’s out, The Verge has a review, and it’s less than wildly enthusiastic. The watch is big, ungainly, inflexible and, at at much as $500 plus a monthly charge from AT&T ($10) or Verizon ($5), expensive.
This is not the first untethered smart watch; Omate’s been doing it for years. What’s new here is the Android Wear part of the equation, and it’s hard to see how that makes worth the money.
Note, though, that although this is the first such watch, it will hardly be the last. Android Wear 2.0 is coming later this year, and the introduction of the eSIM — much smaller and faster than today’s microSIM — bodes well for the untethered concept. Just maybe not so much for this particular product.