This nobody expected: Facebook is making its own smartwatch . The company seems very interested in launching a new hardware product with which they could enhance their social capabilities and give value to the joint use with one of their current star products and even the only one, the Oculus Quest 2.
Facebook wants its own smartwatch
We all know Facebook, we know what its main business is and how it does it, but also that the company has always been interested in the hardware field. It is true that it has not been his strong suit and despite his financial muscle he has had the occasional major setback.
For example, in 2013 Facebook introduced the HTC First . This phone created in collaboration with HTC turned out to be a real failure and soon after it was launched, nobody remembered it. What’s more, it may be that beyond what was published in the specialized presentation, no one spoke of him.
However, today it does have hardware products that are achieving greater penetration. On the one hand, there is Portal, a device with a smart screen that allows you to communicate with other users and access information you have on Facebook social networks, etc. And then there are the Oculus Ques 2 and Go , these virtual reality headsets are arguably the most successful hardware product on Facebook .
Well, now and according to The Information, Mark Zuckerberg’s company seems to be working on a smart watch . It would be their first smartwatch and it seems that the bet is very serious, because they are already planning a second generation that should come out as soon as 2023. But before going to that second model, let’s talk about the first.
A watch to monitor your activity
The Facebook smartwatch would not differ much from other existing market proposals, both as the smartwatches themselves and the activity wristbands. At the hardware level, it would be a device highly focused on the health and monitoring of the user’s physical activity. The difference would later come from the integration with the social capabilities of its third-party platforms and services.
So, this watch, which would be based on an open source version of Android, would be the first and would use this system until that other operating system of their own that they seem to be working on as well. As details, in the absence of knowing the proposal at the design level and other technical data, what it does seem is that it will have a cellular connection so as not to have to depend on a smartphone. And because that would also allow him to offer more and receive more.
And this is where the big tell would come of a product that could be very good in terms of hardware, but does anyone really trust Facebook? That is the big problem that they will have to solve before it is launched, because right now they are not in a position to ask anyone to trust that their data will not come out of there and will be used only for their benefit, not the economic ones of the company.
So, it will be interesting to see how all of this progresses and what moves he makes to level the ground. Because it is true that Facebook improved the management of user privacy and its managers seem to be focused on building new products focused on that aspect, but due to the structure and business it is difficult to imagine what will happen.
