The Nubia Watch is a decadent OLED smart bracelet

Some of the first credible reports about the “Apple iWatch” that I remember reading, described it as “made of curved glass.” The final Apple Watch used naturally curved glass, but it was not really a defining feature of the product. After all, in 2013 The New York Times said Apple’s watch was expected to “stand apart from competitors based on the company’s understanding of how such glass can curve around the human body.” I thought to myself something a little more futuristic than what we got.

Something that looked bad like the Nubia Watch, as it happens. Nubia’s new smartwatch is essentially a bracelet dominated by a large flexible OLED screen that crawls halfway around your wrist, which is technically quite impressive. After drying it for a few weeks, I think it’s probably for the best that the Apple Watch turned out that way. But if you want your portable technology to show technical ambition above all else, it may be worth a look.

The Nubia Watch has just been launched on Kickstarter with prices starting at $ 199, and its campaign is already funded. The Chinese version of the device I tested is already on sale in retail and runs various software, so do not take this as a review – these are just my impressions of the hardware in case you are thinking about backing up.

The first thing to note is that it’s pretty chunky at 14.2mm thick, although it does at least feel comfortable with it for the most part metal construction. It’s rated for IP54 water and dust resistance, and it’s reasonably comfortable to wear, though I’m not saying I love the way it looks. This is an unabashedly techy device, but it’s at least a little slimmer than Nubia’s previous take on the concept, the Alpha.

The screen is 4 inches diagonal and has a resolution of 960×192; you can see the pixels if you look closely, but they are sharp enough at normal viewing distances. It can be a bit tricky to see outside, and there is no automatic adjustment of brightness, but otherwise it is as punchy and contrasting as you would expect from a good OLED panel. The display is covered in Schott’s flexible glass, which is the company that worked with Samsung on their ultra-thin glass for folding phones. It bends easily around your wrist, and I have not seen any scratches or other damage yet.

The rest of the Nubia Watch spec sheet is a little less ambitious. There’s an old Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor, which is not a great sign, and a 425mAh battery. (Nubia says it should take about 36 hours on a single charge; I can not speak for the global model yet, but based on my experience I would say you should definitely charge it every day.). It also provides the usual array of sensors for heart rate, movement, and location, and the Watch has typical basic skills for fitness tracking. In China, it can work as a standalone phone with LTE eSIM support.

The custom software is pretty basic, at least on this Chinese model. There is no way to act on notifications or adjust the recorded faces for customization, although you can edit text for a “marquee” mode that scrolls continuously across the screen. While there are many features here on paper, it does not always work as you might expect. For example, the music app only supports tracks loaded on the watch storage – you can not use it to control the playback on your phone.

The overall UI is very simple – swipe up on the watch face for notifications, down for quick settings, and left or right to access the built-in apps. As you would expect, it is designed to maximize the extreme verticality of the screen, so there is a tendency for information to be displayed about half of your wrist. But in practice, this does not make much difference to usability. For example, while the Weather app shows a full forecast at the same time, you still need to bend your wrist to see more than the central part of the screen. Is that really more convenient than swiping on a normal watch?

Watches are personal devices that allow their wearers to express themselves. In the case of the Nubia Watch, it communicates that you are interested enough in flexible OLED screens that you want to be one of the first people in the world to wrap one around your wrist and be ready to launch the project on Kickstarter support. If that sounds like it, I’ve been greeting you, but you probably would not expect a bad product. We will review the worldwide version in more detail when it becomes available.