While the Japanese electronics giant has proven reticent to provide sufficient support for its American market division, Sony has changed its tune: the newest version of its SmartWatch line of wearable technology will be available through Verizon in the United States.
In a sea of new smart watches that have been flooding the market lately, the SmartWatch 3 may not turn any heads based on looks alone, but under the hood, there’s some significant power at play.
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However, the partnership between Verizon and Sony goes deeper than just a niche product like the SmartWatch 3. The US mobile carrier has struck an exclusive deal with Sony to carry its new Experia Z3v smartphone in America alongside the general worldwide release of the similar Z3. Both handsets feature similar capabilities, including streaming play from Sony’s powerful PlayStation 4 gaming console.
For now, the SmartWatch 3 hasn’t been given a solid US street date, nor has Sony said that other US mobile carriers will be offering the device. While it’s understood that the Z3 may eventually be carried by Verizon rival T-Mobile, there are no indications that the SmartWatch 3 will make its way to the cellular carrier as well.
In a sea of new smart watches that have been flooding the market lately, the SmartWatch 3 may not turn any heads based on looks alone, but under the hood there’s some significant power at play. The first of Sony’s smart watches to support the Android Wear standard, it comes with 4 gigabytes of storage capacity paired with a 420mAh battery and a 1.2 Ghz quat-core processor; as a result the little 320×320 pixel screen watch packs a bit of a punch.
Sony has gone on record that it plans to differentiate its product from other smart watches by including strong app support, including planned remote control functionality and music playback through a Walkman app, fittingly named after the portable music player technology that played a large role in putting Sony on the map in the 1980s. Like similar smart watches, it can connect to other devices through Bluetooth 4.0 and can function either in concert with an Android smartphone or independently.
With all this power and capability packed into a small (and some say ugly) package, the SmartWatch 3 is anything but cheap. Sony plans to set the price of the new piece of wearable technology at $229.99.
This archive content was originally published October 11, 2014 (www.betawired.com)