The Nubia watch is a decadent OLED smart bracelet

Some of the first credible “Apple iWatch” reports that I remember reading described it as “curved glass”. The eventual Apple Watch of course used curved glass to some extent, but that wasn’t really a defining feature of the product. After all, in 2013 The New York Times said Apple’s watch should “stand out from its competition on the basis of the company’s understanding of how such a glass can curve around the human body.” I imagined something a little more futuristic than what we had.

Something that looked more or less like the Nubia Watch, in this case. Nubia’s new smartwatch is essentially a bracelet dominated by a large, flexible OLED display that curls halfway around your wrist, which is technically quite impressive. After wearing it for a few weeks, I think it’s probably for the best that the Apple Watch turned out the way it did. But if you want your wearable tech to be engineering ambition above all else, this might be worth a look.

The Nubia Watch just launched on Kickstarter with prices starting at $ 199, and its campaign has already been funded. The Chinese version of the device, which I have tested, is already available at retail and runs different software, so don’t take this as a review – these are just my impressions of the hardware in case you’re considering supporting.

The first thing to note is that it’s quite chunky at 14.2mm thick, although it at least feels sturdy with its largely metal construction. It’s rated for IP54 water and dust resistance, and it’s reasonably comfortable to wear, although I wouldn’t say I like the way it looks. It’s a decidedly technical device, but it’s at least a bit sleeker than Nubia’s previous version on the concept, the Alpha.

The screen has a diagonal of 4 inches and a resolution of 960×192; you can see the pixels if you look closely, but they are sharp enough at normal viewing distances. It can be a little hard to see outside and there’s no automatic brightness adjustment, but otherwise it’s as punchy and high-contrast as you’d expect from a good OLED panel. The screen is covered with flexible glass from Schott, the company that worked with Samsung on its ultra-thin glass for foldable phones. It folds easily around your wrist and I haven’t seen any scratches or other damage show up yet.

The rest of the Nubia Watch datasheet is a little less ambitious. There’s an aging Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor, which isn’t a good sign, and a 425mAh battery. (Nubia says it should last around 36 hours on a charge; I can’t speak for the Global model yet, but in my experience I would say you’ll definitely need to charge it every day.) It also features the usual array of sensors for heart rate, movement, and location, and the watch has typical basic fitness tracking capabilities. In China, it can work as a standalone phone with LTE eSIM support.

The custom software is pretty basic, at least on this Chinese model. There’s no way to act on notifications or customize the included watch faces, although you can change the text to a “select” mode that continually scrolls across the screen. While there is a lot of functionality here on paper, it doesn’t always work as expected. The music app, for example, only supports tracks that have been loaded to the watch’s storage – you can’t use it to control playback on your phone.

The overall user interface is very simple: swipe up on the watch face for notifications, down for quick settings, and left or right to access built-in apps. As you might expect, it’s designed to maximize the extreme verticality of the screen, so information tends to be displayed around half of your wrist. But in practice, that doesn’t make much of a difference for usability. For example, while the weather app shows the forecast for a full week at a time, you still need to bend your wrist to see more than the middle part of the screen. Is it really more practical than sliding on a normal watch?

Watches are personal devices that allow their wearers to express themselves. In the case of the Nubia Watch, that indicates that you are interested enough in flexible OLED displays that you want to be one of the first people in the world to wrap one around your wrist and that you are ready to support the project on Kickstarter. If this sounds like you, I salute you, but you probably shouldn’t expect a stylish product. We will check the global version in more detail when it becomes available.