The last we heard about the HTC smartwatch, it was to have been released “before the end of April.” Now a couple of days into May, there is still no sign of it. Evan Blass, formerly known as famed leaker @evleaks, today took to Twitter to indicate that the launch had been pushed back to the week of June 6th.
FYI, this has been pushed to the week of June 6th. #htcwearablehttps://t.co/Ei1lT4aWoc
— Evan Blass (@evleaks) May 3, 2016
No explanation was provided as to why HTC might have decided to postpone the launch of its first smartwatch. It may be that its attention was focused on the launch of its latest flagship smartphone, the HTC M10, or that it did not want to distract from it.
More recently, HTC CEO Cher Wang promised that “When HTC comes out with a smartwatch, we will turn the industry on its head.” Unfortunately, there have been few details so far to indicate how the HTC smartwatch might accomplish that. It’s not even clear at this point whether it will use the Android Wear platform despite being named among the first partners when it was first announced back in 2014.
Sales of smartwatches are picking up quickly. Shipments jumped 223% from Q1 2015 to Q1 2016 on the heels of even stronger holiday quarter where some 8.1 million smartwatches were shipped. It is still early days for this market segment and HTC can still carve itself a healthy niche should it come out with a compelling device.