Battery life has always been a concern for smart watches. While it is a handy companion for our smart phones, ideally we won’t need to charge as often on a daily basis. For the next ZenWatch, ASUS says that it will deliver a long lasting battery life with up to a week on a single charge. That’s a huge jump from its current ZenWatch that is rated to last about 2 days of average use.
To enable this, ASUS would need to increase its power efficiency with adoption of simpler chipsets and mobile operating system design. It isn’t mentioned but ASUS could be using a different OS other than Android Wear for its next model. Since the first gen ZenWatch was announced last year at IFA 2014, ASUS is targeting to release the 2nd ZenWatch around the same time in Q3 2015. In addition, it could be fully dependent and you can make calls/SMS directly without pairing with a smart phone, which is similar to the Samsung Gear S.
The current ZenWatch runs on Android Wear and it has a 1.63″ AMOLED display that does 320×320 resolution. It runs on a 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400 processor with 512MB RAM and 4GB of storage. Like most new smart watches, it also has a heart rate sensor and water resistance as well. Priced at US$199 (about RM718) in the US, the ZenWatch is said to be coming into Malaysia in the first quarter of this year.
On top of that, ASUS is reported to be working on 2 wristband type wearables that are focused on health and fitness. It is said to be affordable and has the ability to track footsteps, heart rate, pulse and even blood sugar. According to Gartner Inc research firm, smart watch will take 40% of total consumer wirst-worn devices by 2016. Hopefully most of these devices will stay on the wrists for long as another report indicates that a third of smart watch users have given up after 6 months.
