The Year of the Smartwatch?

It has been a down year for the entire smartwatch industry. 2016 was not kind to any manufacture in the way of sells for their smartwatches. Many tech insiders believed the concept of the smartwatch was dying. LG, Huawei, Samsung, and HTC seem poised to re-energize the smartwatch market. The picture above depicts two upcoming smartwatches from LG. These smartwatches, if rumors are true, could be revealed on February 9th.

These watches have been designed in partnership with Google to debut their new Android Wear 2.0 release. In a January 17 post from VentureBeat they explain the specs both watches will come with.

"They will be called the LG Watch Sport and Watch Style, meaning the names contain no Google branding. The Sport will have a 1.38" display, while the Style will be 1.2" across. The Sport gets more RAM (768MB, versus 512 on the Style), LTE, a heart rate sensor, and GPS. The Style lacks any of these additional features. The Sport is rated IP68, while the Style is IP67. Style comes in three colors (titanium, silver, rose gold), while the larger Sport comes in two (titanium, dark blue).

VentureBeat also went on to explain that the larger of the two watches, the LG Watch Sport will also include LTE phone service capabilities to make the watch work as a standalone piece independent of a phone. The LG Watch Sport is also rumored to have an NFC chip for mobile payments. Although VentureBeat writer and well known tech leaker Evan Blass has said the smaller of the two watches, the LG Watch Style will not come with an NFC chip. This is a little bit of a departure from the push Google is making on its smartwatch platform, as it is trying to move mobile payments within its smartwatch eco system.

2017 will be a crucial year for the smartwatch industry as a whole. LG is poised to be the first company to jump into the 2017 smartwatch market and later in Fall Apple is poised to offer a redesign of its smartwatch the AppleWatch. Only time will tell if the smartwatch makes a comeback in 2017.