After making its debut at the Consumer Electronics Show early this year, the Alcatel Onetouch Watch is finally available in Singapore for S$248.
The low-cost smartwatch, which snagged an iF Design Award, sports an elegant design and is made of materials such as brushed chrome, micro-textured resin bands and white stainless steel.
Packed in its guts are a heart-rate monitor embedded on the underside of the watch face, along with an accelerometer, gyroscope, altimeter and an e-compass. As with all wearable devices, you can use it to monitor your fitness and track your sleep cycle through an activity overview.
A common bugbear with smartwatches is that they need to be paired with a smartphone – and remain within its vicinity – to be useful. To help with that, the Android and iOS compatible smartwatch will alert users who stray too far from their phones. It will even help you locate a misplaced phone by making it ring.
Note though, that the Onetouch Wear runs on its own operating system – not Android Wear that we are more familiar with. And without a built-in microphone, you won’t be able to use speech-to-text to reply to messages.
While we’re still in search of wearable technology’s killer app, the wallet-friendly Onetouch Watch, available on Qoo10, Lazada, Rakuten, Cocomi and Groupon, might just entice those who’ve been sitting on the fence to give smartwatches a shot.
