A few years ago, in the days before Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch and WearOS, the standard futuristic vision of a smartwatch was one of a giant, cuff-like device with a screen that wraps around your wrist.
The early renderings and design concepts we would see were more than smartphones that people could wear instead of the really stylish watches we see today adorned with modern technology.
But that hasn’t stopped ZTE from its second attempt at a smartwatch that no one has asked for. And the Nubia Watch has just gone live on Kickstarter, a sequel to last year’s Nubia Alpha prototype.
I’ve been wrapping the Nubia Watch around my wrist for the last few days – here’s what you need to know.
Nubia Watch: Design and build
It’s massive. It’s chunky. It in no way resembles a regular watch. But that’s not really the point is it?
It’s all about that amazingly large (for a smartwatch, at least) 4.01-inch, 960 x 192 (244ppi), flexible AMOLED display.
Unlike the Alpha, which curves the entire screen, it is sort of split into three sections.
You have the front-facing display, which is probably about 60% of the screen irreplaceable in total and lies fairly flat for optimal visibility.
This comes along with the top and bottom edges that you can not see at all unless you bend your wrist around curved corners.
The kind of work. Most importantly, the ‘flat’ piece of the screen is even much larger than you would normally get on a smartwatch, and you see enough information there; the top and bottom edges just compliment that.
It’s much less of an eye-catcher than its prototype brethren, the Alpha – thanks to the front-facing camera.
At less than 100g, it is also about 50% lighter than its predecessor; but it’s also twice as heavy as the likes of the Apple Watch Series 5 and the Samsung Galaxy Watch 3.
After a while, you start to feel its bulk, but the same can be said about heavy high-end regular watches.
On the side is a lone button that you use to go back to the home page. Everything else, controlling, is done by swipes, pinches and dragging. It’s pretty intuitive and is in fact much more like a smartphone controller than a smartwatch.
The display, so large, is clear enough to be seen with beautiful vibrant colors – but it’s also super reflective, so not everything is so handy on a sunny day.
Nubia Watch: Software and Features
Like the Alpha, the Nubia Watch is referred to in the app and all documentation as a “wearable phone”.
In China, where it goes on sale separately to the Kickstarter campaign, it works completely independently thanks to 4G eSIM support.
I did not have a Chinese eSIM in my review model, so I was surprised to see that the phone option was still available.
Maybe it would work via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, use my phone back? No such luck – the screen just went off when I tried to make a call.
The screen freezes a lot, it must be said. Some notifications caused it to freeze and some screens flickered just before they went blank. It all feels not-quite-ready.
The OS, which I judge to be a kind of proprietary Android fork, offers all the basic things you would expect on a smartwatch, including fitness tracking, heart rate monitoring and music playback; but I had a hard time getting a lot of it to play nice.
That’s probably because a lot of the features are lost in translation – confusing as heck menus and names on both the watch and the app offer things like ‘Watch Switch’, ‘Barrage’, ‘Marquee Switch’ and more.
The app is infested with screens that are a mashup of English and Chinese.
Marquee Switch, for example, has a flashing display that says ‘Music’ and jumps around on time with music being played. At least, I think that was what it did. It may have hypnotized me.
I managed to follow a GPS walk, where I think the stats were pretty accurate (but no map data to make it), but I was not lucky enough to make music there using the ‘transfer channel’ method, which ‘ t – according to poorly translated help page on the app – seems to connect to tethering my phone, instead of using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to sync.
Nubia Watch: Initiative Judgment
It’s bad to beat the Nubia Watch. Maybe it deserves some mockery and I really do not believe there is a real market for it – especially in the western world.
But it kind of turns out to do and be exactly what it was meant to be – a novelty, ‘futuristic’, smartwatch with a USP that no other smartwatch offers; ie that mahoosive flexible AMOLED display.
It’s buggy as heck, the app still feels in the early stages of beta testing and the software feels familiar to the Samsung Galaxy Gear of 2013. But it’s also a real head turner.
People will ask you, “What the hell is that?” if you wear it out and over.
It’s up to you if that’s a good or a bad thing.
The Nubia Watch is on sale in China for 1799 yuan, which is about $ 260. On Kickstarter, the super early bird price sold for $ 179 for the first 200.
