ASUS plans to discontinue further development of the smart watch ZenWatch, as sales of wearable devices have been below expectations. This writes DigiTimes, citing sources close to the company.
ASUS announced the first generation smart watch in 2014, and in August of last year debuted the third generation of gadget – 3 ZenWatch. From its predecessors the model is characterized primarily by the shape instead of rectangle with rounded corners came round. Watch is equipped with a display screen of 1.39 inches with a resolution of 400 x 400 pixels with a protection in the form of tempered glass Gorilla Glass and enclosed in a waterproof housing with a thickness of 9.95 mm.
3 ZenWatch built on the first single-chip system Qualcomm for wearable devices – Snapdragon Wear 2100. The amount of RAM is 512 MB, constant memory is 4 GB. Works gadget running Android Wear 2.0 with a proprietary interface 50 and the display options of the clock. In Russia 3 ZenWatch went on sale in late 2016 at a price of 21,000 rubles.
According to sources, currently produces about 5-6 thousand Skins per month. In Assembly of the gadgets meets Taiwanese contract manufacturer Pegatron.
ASUS has failed to break into the rankings of the leading providers of wearable electronics. According to Strategy Analytics, the global market leader of wearable devices in January-March 2017 are Apple Watch and fitness trackers Fitbit, previously ranked first, fell to third place, behind even the Chinese competitor Xiaomi. According to experts, Apple has shipped 3.5 million smart watches and Fitbit and Xiaomi are 3.4 and 2.9 million wearable devices respectively.
Research firm Canalys also recognized Apple Watch is the most popular of wearable wrist smart devices, but according to these analysts, in the first quarter 2017 delivery of the Apple Watch were in the range of 2.9 million units.
