Details and photos emerge of the Zeaplus Watch K18
A few days back we told you about an upcoming smartwatch from Elephone that’s said to run Android Wear. The Zeaplus Watch K18 is another wearable set to arrive from the Far East, and while it runs Android, it’s not the OS made for wearables.
The Zeaplus Watch K18 is going to join the ranks of circular smartwatches, and the company has opted for a more traditional look compared to some of the more modern wearables we’ve seen. It’s a bit of a cross between the LG G Watch R and Samsung Gear S2 when it comes to the design, but with a few extra buttons thrown in for good measure.
Zeaplus has done a great job with the design of the Zeaplus Watch K18, but as we all know, that’s only half the battle. When it comes to specs, the K18 can stand proudly among it’s brethren with a 1.4-inch round AMOLED panel with a resolution of 400 x 400, a 1.2GHz MediaTek chip and 512MB of RAM. The storage is listed as the standard 4GB, and you’ll get a heart rate sensor and pedometer to boot. You’ll also get a SIM card slot, which is something you don’t see every day. As for the OS, the watch will run ZOS, a custom version of Android 4.4.
While the Zeaplus Watch K18 won’t run Android Wear, it’s a looker and we’re curious to see what the company has done with their custom OS. We’re not sure of the Zeaplus Watch K18 release date or pricing at this time, but will keep you in the loop as we learn more.
via – Gizmochina
Comments
One thought on “Details and photos emerge of the Zeaplus Watch K18”
I received this watch (regular puchase) form GearB..t yesterday. Screen is indeed very nice and bright – full-round and high resolution. Build quality is nice, too. It goes downhill from there. The OS is a REALLY stripped-out version of Android 4.4.2 and not really recognizable. A number of operational shortcomings have led me to request an RMA to return it: 1) despite claims on the GB website, this watch does not have Google Play Store. It does have a rudimentary browser and I could call up the play store, but could not download Google maps to the watch. 2) It does have WiFi, but will only accept a 21-character password and my router requires 30, so no WiFi from the house. Had to go to McDonalds to play with it; 3) The companion software (app2open) has a web portal in Chinese only. After fumbling around for a while, I was able to get a link to download it to my phone, although Lookout warned me that there were multiple signs of malware in the download. I did download it anyway for a brief period, and it is pretty poor. Only the most basic notification control and pedometer that you would see in a $25 Chinese smartwatch.Even though I was able to get the watch to pair with my Note4 phone, no notifications came through, despite dogged troubleshooting; 3) The SIM slot is apparently for a different SIM than the standard micro-SIM we have in the US. I believe I read somewhere that this has a “nano-SIM” slot, so another PITA I was unwilling to go through. 4) Although the descriptions of thes watach say it has 3.8 Gigs of ROM, the watch (out of the box) showed only 1.3 Gigs. The settings list mentions a GPS, but there is zero software in the watch to utilize it, and I couldn’t make G-Maps download, so GPS is useless. The User “manual” is 6 pages of 2-point type which was obviously translated from Chinese by Google translator, as there was not one sentence in the whole thing that made any sense whatoever. Useless.
So, In summary, the hardware and specs look pretty good, but the extremely poor OS makes this nice-looking watch a drawer-dweller. Consider the K8 (square) watch from AiWatch (and others) which has a 320×320 screen and an OS that is almost identical to any Android smartphone.