Huawei has released details of many upcoming products in the past few days. Joining the Mate 70 is a new version of Huawei’s Watch Ultimate Design Edition, a smartwatch that borrows a few tips from high-end horology purveyors.
Those tips are almost universally from the ‘design’ side of the flashy name, resulting in a smartwatch that looks like it belongs in a watchmaker’s catalogue and not on a Chinese website. We’re awfully glad it appears on the latter, though, since there’s a chance we’ll get hold of it at some point.
Intelligent Ultimate Design
Okay, perhaps it’ll be as inaccessible as a Tag or Bulgari. This is based on the build materials Huawei offers for its revamped Watch Ultimate. In addition to the new Sapphire colourway, the bezel is made from 18-karat gold and ceramic nanocrystal. The crown continues the gold theme but adds titanium to the mix. Liquid metal (a zirconium alloy), sapphire glass, and a nifty little feature called Physical Vapor Deposition figure in the watch’s construction.
The entire thing weighs just 78 grams, not including the gold/titanium strap, and features a 466 x 466 1.5in AMOLED display running Huawei’s wearable operating system. This supports Android 8.0 and upward, though if you’re slapping an Ultimate Design watch on your arm but are still running Android Oreo, something has gone horribly wrong with your priorities.
Beyond that, expect a full suite of the company’s sensors including depth sensors and a barometric reader, support for the measurement of human bodies in motion and at rest (it has Huawei’s Trusleep sleep tracking), a rotating crown (another one of the gold bits), and water resistance up to 10ATM. If you’re planning on flashing this thing at nurse sharks a hundred metres down the Great Barrier Reef, it should stand up to the treatment.
You can’t actually buy these in South Africa. Chinese pricing is available for the Watch Ultimate Design Gold Sapphire edition which costs about R60,000. If you’re looking to buy one without travelling to another country, you can expect to pay closer to R73,000. When it becomes available, of course.