OnePlus is no longer a fledgling company, thanks to its 3 flagship devices, and one very powerful mid-ranger, in the last 3 years, the Chinese OEM is regarded highly amongst the Android aficionados. Many of its users, or should I say fans, have been asking the company to launch a wearable device, aka a smartwatch.
OnePlus does have a lot of products in its portfolio, including headphones, USB Type-C cables, power banks and more. And it appears that the company did indeed plan to make a smartwatch.
Carl Pei, the co-founder of OnePlus, tweeted some sketches of the company’s canceled smartwatches. Yes, in the plural, as you can see from the image featured above. One of the designs has a circular design with a round dial, and the strap embedded to it. The bottom part of the watch should have been removable, with the press of a button. There is an image which shows lugs for the round dial model too.
The second OnePlus smartwatch has a rectangular curved display, and sports lugs. The straps appear to be changeable, which would have looked like a cool wearable. Sadly, it appears that we will never see the watches, as OnePlus had canceled it, last year.
Ironically, this is the same Carl Pei, who termed “smartwatches are useless”, in an infamous tweet in June 2015.
Cool product, but regretted the purchase 5min after using it. This entire category is useless. pic.twitter.com/M8BUmJxZ2X
— Carl Pei (@getpeid) June 17, 2015
The watch he tweeted about is the Pebble Time, a company which OnePlus currently partners with, and even gives away some of its wearables in contests regularly. Then again, this is the company which deemed NFC useless too, and skipped it in the OnePlus 2, for which it got slammed, and we all know what happened with the recently launched OnePlus 3.