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LG announces Watch Urbane LTE

by on26 February 2015


700 mAh battery, VoLTE meets fancy design

LG is obviously very serious about smartwatches, as it is about to announce its fourth watch, but this one is not based on Google's Android Wear operating system. 

Just two weeks after it announced a fancy looking LG Watch Urbane, it has a follow-up with the Watch Urbane LTE, a unique version of the Urbane watch.

The new Watch Urbane LTE has 700 mAh battery and Snapdragon 400 at 1.2GHz. Since Snapdragon is LTE capable, we believe LG is simply using the feature form the chip. The Korean press release also lists 802.11 b, g, n, Bluetooth 4.0LE, NFC as well as a speaker and microphone in the feature list. As noted, the new LG Watch Urbane LTE is not based on Google's Android Wear OS but rather LG's own Wearable Platform OS.

The watch has a 1.3-inch P-OLED 320x320 screen with 245 ppi, and has 1GB LPDDR3 memory and 4GB eMMC. It is IP67 certified and as you can imagine the 1.7 increase in battery size from 410 mAh with LG Watch Urbane to 700 mAh will make it heavier, but should make it last longer. An LTE modem needs a lot of power, too.  

LG will introduce this LTE capable watch at Mobile World Congress 2015 next week in Barcelona and this should be the world's first LTE communication module mounted on a watch.

You should be able to use VoLTE LTE based voice service and fast data transmission and reception. LG promises an  NFC wallet feature for simple electronic payments, as well as three functional buttons. We are not sure if the watch comes with a nano-SIM card tray, or how LG plans to make a watch work on carriers, ie if you will need a voice plan or will it simply work with an LTE capable data plan. We can only hope that most people buying this LTE watch will have calls via a Bluetooth headpiece as otherwise it will look really silly in action. 

The watch looks expensive, there is no doubt that it will probably cost as much as a good phone. Our educated guess would put this one close to $499 in the US or €499 in Europe, but we hope we are wrong about it. Fudzilla expect the Urbane non-LTE watch should sell for about $349 but this is nothing we can confirm, just our best guess. As for the OS on the Urbane LTE, you do the guessing.

Last modified on 26 February 2015
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