Smartwatches haven’t become as ubiquitous as we had expected them to, over the past couple years. There has only been a steady decline in product releases and sales. And now adding to the same is Lenovo-owned Moto, who has today confirmed that the company has no plans of releasing a successor to the Moto 360 – it’s beautiful circular smartwatch.
The analysts didn’t expect Lenovo to debut a new smartwatch earlier this year as the 2nd-gen. Moto 360, which is over a year old, is still a worthy alternative for Android Wear enthusiasts. But their expectations of getting their hands on a new Moto 360 alongside the release of Android Wear 2.0 have now also been crushed by the company.
While talking about this decision at a Motorola press event in Chicago, Shakil Barkat, head of global product development at Moto, said,
[The company doesn’t] see enough pull in the market at this point to put a new smartwatch. Wearables do not have broad enough appeal for us to continue to build on it year after year.
He further mentioned that Motorola’s annual device roadmap doesn’t focus on any wearables, including smartwatches. Though he didn’t completely slice our hearts and said that the company might revisit the market in the future when the technologies for the wrist have progressed a step further.
While this might be saddening for some wearable enthusiasts, it deals a huge blow to the declining popularity of the Android Wear ecosystem. Neither the partner manufacturers have refreshed their device offerings recently nor has Android delivered on its promise of releasing an updated, feature-packed OS this year. Google itself has delayed the release of Android Wear to sometime early next year.
One can also see the consolidation in the wearable market with the rumors of Pebble, the widely popular smartwatch maker, being involved in acquisition talks with Fitbit. This transaction will value Pebble somewhere in the ballpark of $34 to $40 million.
