Just 4 months after its initial release, Verizon has already killed its Wear24 smartwatch.
No matter how big of a Google fan you are, we can all admit that Android Wear isn’t in the prettiest of places at the moment. Mainstream releases like the LG Watch Sport and Huawei Watch 2 never truly cultivated much of a following at all, and aside from these two entries, the rest of the space has been essentially dominated by fashion brands.
Verizon’s Wear24 made a debut in February as a new Android Wear option to take advantage of the carrier’s 4G LTE network, but after being released in May, the watch is already dead.
It was discovered yesterday that the product page for the Wear24 had been replaced by its support page, and after Android Police reached out to Verizon for comment on this, a representative replied by simply saying “Yes wear24 has been discontinued.” No more, no less.
Well, that didn’t last very long.
When it was announced, the Wear24 offered an interesting proposition. The 1.39-inch AMOLED display, 450 mAh battery, IP67 rating, built-in GPS, and LTE connectivity packed into a fairly clean body sounded like a nice offering, but the price of $300 with a two-year contract and $349 outright likely kept most buyers at bay. I mean, obviously, it did if the thing’s already been discontinued.
Even though Android Wear as a whole is going through some serious growing pains, Verizon’s random axing of the Wear24 after just 4 months of being on the market is still pretty insane.
Software updates and customer support for the Wear24 will likely be ending soon after the halt of sales, but considering that Verizon probably sold about … 24 of these things, this shouldn’t impact many people.
