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A few years ago, in the days before Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch, and WearOS, the futuristic default vision of a smartwatch was that of a giant cuff-shaped device with a screen wrapped around your wrist.
The first renderings and design concepts we would see looked more like smartphones that people might wear rather than the truly stylish watches we see today adorned with cutting edge technology.
But that hasn’t stopped ZTE from launching its second smartwatch attempt that no one has requested. And the Nubia Watch just went live on Kickstarter, a follow-up to last year’s Nubia Alpha prototype.
I’ve had the Nubia watch wrapped around my wrist for the past few days – here’s what you need to know.
Nubia Watch: design and construction
It is enormous. This is big. It looks nothing like an ordinary watch. But that’s not really the point, is it?
It’s that amazingly large (for a smartwatch, at least) 4.01-inch flexible AMOLED display 960 x 192 (244ppi).
Unlike the Alpha, which curved the entire screen, it’s sort of split into three sections.
You have the front-facing screen, which is probably around 60% of the total screen area and is fairly flat for optimal visibility.
It joins the top and bottom edges which you can’t really see at all unless you bend your wrist at weird angles.
It sort of works. The main, “flat” part of the screen is always much larger than what you would normally get on a smartwatch, so you see a lot of information there; the top and bottom edges complete this.
It’s far less of a horror than its prototype brethren, the Alpha – thanks to the downfall of the front camera.
At less than 100g, it’s also about 50% lighter than its predecessor; but it is also twice as heavy as Apple Watch Series 5 and Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 models.
After awhile, you start to feel its volume, but the same can be said of heavy high-end regular watches.
On the side is a lonely button that you use to return to the home screen. Everything else, from a control point of view, is by sliding, pinching and sliding. It’s pretty intuitive and actually looks a lot more like controlling a smartphone than a smartwatch.
The screen, being so large, is clear enough to be seen with pretty bright colors – but it’s also very reflective, so not very useful in sunny weather.
Nubia Watch: software and features
Like the Alpha, the Nubia Watch is referred to as a “cell phone” in the app and in all documentation.
In China, where it is offered for sale separately from the Kickstarter campaign, it operates completely autonomously thanks to 4G eSIM support.
I didn’t have a Chinese eSIM in my review model, so I was surprised to see that the phone dialing option was still available.
Maybe it would work over wi-fi or bluetooth, layering my phone? No luck – the screen froze when I tried to make a call.
The screen froze a lot, it must be said. Some notifications caused it to freeze and some screens flickered just before going blank. All of this does not seem quite ready.
The operating system, which I’m guessing is sort of a proprietary Android fork, offers all the basic things you’d expect in a smartwatch, including fitness tracking, heart rate monitoring, and heart rate monitoring. music reading; but I had trouble getting it to play properly.
This may be because a lot of features are lost during translation – confusing as the menus and names of the watch and app offer things like “ Watch Switch ”, “ Barrage ”, “ Marquee Switch ” and more.
The app is littered with screens which are a mix of English and Chinese.
Marquee Switch, for example, has a flashing screen that says “Music” and bounces to the beat of the music being played. At least I think that’s what he was doing. Maybe that hypnotized me.
I managed to follow a GPS walk, where I think the stats were pretty accurate (but no map data to back them up) but didn’t have a chance to get music using the “ “ transfer channel, ” which – according to the poorly translated help page on the app – seemed to involve tethering from my phone, rather than using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi for syncing.
Nubia Watch: initial verdict
It’s hard to hit the Nubia Watch. Maybe it deserves a bit of a joke and I don’t think there is a real market for it – especially in the western world.
But it’s sort of doing and being exactly what it intended to be – a new “futuristic” smartwatch with a USP that no other smartwatch offers; that is, the mahoosive flexible AMOLED screen.
It’s buggy like hell, the app still looks early in beta testing and the software looks familiar to the 2013 Samsung Galaxy Gear. But it’s also a real head spin.
People will ask you, “What is this?” if you wear it out and about.
It’s up to you to decide if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
The Nubia watch is on sale in China for 1,799 yuan, or around $ 260. On Kickstarter, the price of the super early bird is $ 179 for the first 200 sold.
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