Strategy Analytics Wearables Service brings you daily coverage of the year’s largest consumer electronics convention: CES 2019. Our day 2 blog will focus on smartwatch announcements from the show floor.
Our day 1 coverage can be accessed as below:
CES 2019: Day 1 - What to Expect in Wearables
Smartwatches are those devices with a high level OS capable of running third party apps. Major announcements include:
- Garmin announced their first cellular connected smartwatch, the ‘Vivoactive 3 Music – Connected by Verizon’.The device sports cellular connectivity exclusively with Verizon in the US via physical SIM card rather than an eSIM.Garmin has also added ‘Incident Detection’, which functions similarly to fall detection on the Apple Watch, by automatically notifying your contacts and including your location whenever it detects an impact during activity
- Fossil Group has added 2 new Wear OS powered smartwatches to their line-up - the Michael Kors Access Sofie 2 and Kate Spade Scallop Smartwatch 2.These devices add heart rate monitoring, GPS tracking, and contactless payments, offering a notably improved feature-set over previous generations
- Mobvoi has launched the Wear OS powered Ticwatch E2 and Ticwatch S2.The devices have increased in size slightly, and most notably added 5ATM waterproofing for swimming and surfing, versus the IP67 rating of the previous iterations. The devices sport GPS, heart rate monitors, and interchangeable bands, though lack NFC for mobile payments
Smartwatch sales are expected to grow 27% in 2019, and likely surpassed fitness bands for the first time ever in 2018 (as we predicted in 2015) as smartwatch cannibalization of high tier fitness bands solidifies. Strategy Analytics contends that betting on fitness bands over smartwatches is analogous to betting on feature phones over smartphones a decade ago.
Exhibit 1: Fossil Group’s Michael Kors Access Sofie 2
