Smartwatches continue to fight for consumer attention, but one detail still holds many buyers back: battery life. Nobody enjoys having to charge yet another device every day. Asus, however, has stepped up with its new VivoWatch smartwatch, which promises a full ten days of battery life.
Battery Life: The Biggest Challenge for Smartwatches
Most of the recent buzz in the smartwatch world has revolved around the Apple Watch. Though it might be hard to believe, expert opinions largely agree more or less on one thing: it’s an impeccably designed device, but it also brings along a few headaches, especially on the software side, as a first-generation product. Unsurprisingly, one of its main issues is battery life. To get a single day of use out of the Apple Watch, you have to be relatively conservative, and the same applies to many other smartwatches. The big exception so far has been the Pebble Time, which, with its seven days of autonomy, crushed Kickstarter and raised over $20 million.
Asus VivoWatch: Simple, Smart, and Long-Lasting
Now Asus is joining the party with the VivoWatch. Last September, the Taiwanese manufacturer presented its ZenWatch, which was well received. Rumors initially pointed to a second-generation ZenWatch this year, but Asus CEO Jerry Shen confirmed that we’ll have to wait until 2016. In the meantime, the VivoWatch takes a simpler approach, featuring a display with just 128 by 128 pixels, a heart-rate sensor, Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity, a UV sensor, IP67 water resistance, and, the icing on the cake: ten days of battery life. Asus claims the VivoWatch can be charged in one to two hours, but the lack of technical details about the screen suggests it might be using electronic ink. The operating system is not Android Wear; instead, it runs on Asus’s own internal solution.
The official price of the Asus VivoWatch is €149, putting it on par with the Pebble Time. If there are no delays, the new watch should hit European store shelves in May. The absence of Android Wear has led some outlets to deny the VivoWatch the smartwatch label, but I don’t think that’s the case. Its features are more than enough, and I don’t hear anyone saying the Pebble Time isn’t a smartwatch either. So the VivoWatch presents itself as a worthy competitor, at a much more aggressive price than we expected.
