Huawei Confirms Android Wear Smartwatch, Fitness Devices For 2015

Huawei has confirmed it will launch a smartwatch powered by Google’s Android Wear software sometime this year.

The Chinese manufacturer will also be releasing several fitness-related wearables as the company looks to expand further into the wearables market.

The new releases, which will follow up on Huawei’s existing TalkBand fitness tracker, were revealed to media attendees on a trip to the company’s Shenzhen campus, and will probably see the light of day at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March.

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Android seems to be an integral part of Huawei’s mobile strategy going forward, as the company also revealed that it has no plans to return to the Windows Phone platform, which it had dabbled in in the past with devices such as the Ascend W1.

“It’s hard to really differentiate between Huawei and other manufacturers [with Windows Phone]” Shao Yang, Huawei’s CMO for Device, told TechRadar, “Android is a better choice for us.”

Yang added: “the biggest problem is the lack of DIY on Windows Phone, it’s all very similar across manufacturers. On Android you can have a very different character.”

Huawei has traditionally looked to its Emotion UI to help its devices stand out in a crowded marketplace, allowing them to have a different look and feel to rivals, but Windows Phone does not allow this kind of flexibility.

This isn’t the first time that Huawei has dismissed Microsoft’s mobile platform, too, with Yang giving an interview back in December in which he declared, “We didn’t make any money in Windows Phone…Nobody made any money in Windows Phone.”

Earlier this week, Huawei declared it plans to ship around 100 million smartphones in 2015 as part of its plans to become a heavyweight player on the mobile devices market. The company hopes that the bulk of this growth will come from high-end smartphones, with Huawei having launched several such devices last year, including the Ascend P7 smartphone and Mate 7 phablet.

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