LG's ‘luxury’ Watch Urbane LTE doesn't use Android Wear
LG has already pre-announced the Watch Urbane, its “luxury” smartwatch that it's showing off in Barcelona next week, and now even more details have been revealed ahead of Mobile World Congress. It turns out the Watch Urbane has a second …
Context & Ripple Effects
LG's Barcelona lineup just split in two. Ten days after announcing the Watch Urbane as an Android Wear device with a round display and metal body round-display Android Wear debut, LG is showing a second Urbane at Mobile World Congress that runs WebOS instead — same luxury positioning, different operating system. The hands-on coverage confirms both variants side by side WebOS and Android Wear Urbane hands-on.
That makes LG the rare vendor running two smartwatch platforms at once, and it foreshadows the rest of the year's coverage: LG later brings cellular to Android Wear via the Urbane 2nd Edition LTE first Android Wear watch with LTE, only to cancel that rollout over hardware issues months later Urbane 2nd Edition LTE cancellation.
First-order effects
- LG now maintains two parallel Urbane product lines — one on Google's Android Wear, one on its own WebOS — splitting its developer and marketing effort across both.
- Google loses exclusive claim to LG's premium tier: the 'luxury' positioning LG built around the original Urbane announcement now sits on a non-Android-Wear OS.
Second-order effects
- WebOS gets a flagship wearable showcase it otherwise lacked, giving other watchmakers a credible alternative to licensing Android Wear for high-end hardware.
- Cellular ambitions migrate back to the Android Wear track with the Urbane 2nd Edition LTE, concentrating connectivity risk on Google's platform rather than the WebOS variant.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — dual-OS experimentation followed by the LTE model's cancellation over hardware problems — the structural lesson is that cellular smartwatches are hard enough that vendors can't afford to also carry two software stacks, pushing LG toward consolidation.
- A wearable market where even Google's closest hardware partners hedge with in-house OSes signals Android Wear cannot be assumed as the default layer for premium devices.
The trend: Smartwatch vendors are hedging between Google's Android Wear and their own operating systems precisely as cellular capability raises the technical stakes of getting the software stack right.