LG Watch Urbane LTE will be available in South Korea March 27 for $590
Rich Edmonds / Android Central :
Context & Ripple Effects
LG has been running two parallel watch lines out of its February announcement: the round, metal Android Wear Watch Urbane, and this separate 'luxury' variant that skips Android Wear entirely for webOS with built-in LTE. Hands-on coverage framed them as siblings with divergent software and radios.
The $590 Korean launch price positions the LTE model far above where LG took the standard Urbane — the Android Wear Urbane landed in the US for $349 a month later — making the premium explicitly about standalone cellular rather than materials.
First-order effects
- Korean buyers from March 27 get a smartwatch that places calls and carries data without a paired phone, at a $240+ premium over LG's own Android Wear Urbane — the first real price signal for what standalone-LTE wearables cost.
- LG now has to support webOS on a wrist while simultaneously shipping Android Wear hardware, splitting its wearable developer and marketing resources across two platforms.
Second-order effects
- Carriers become the natural distribution channel for a watch sold on its radio rather than its apps, giving Korean operators a new accessory attach point alongside phone subsidies.
- The $590 sticker sets a high-water reference point that makes the $349 Wear Urbane look like the value pick, pressuring LG to clarify which line is the flagship.
Third-order effects
- If standalone LTE is worth a near-double premium, cellular moves from optional add-on to expected feature in premium watches — a bet LG doubled down on when it later revealed the first Android Wear device with built-in cellular capability.
- Running a proprietary OS on a halo device only pays off if it becomes a testbed: the pattern here points toward vendors experimenting outside Google's stack, then folding the winning features back into it — the same consolidation visible two years later when even LG's Android Pay-equipped Watch Sport landed at $349.
The trend: Smartwatches are bifurcating into cheap tethered companions and expensive standalone-LTE devices, with vendors using proprietary-OS experiments to probe how much buyers will pay for untethered connectivity before folding it into the mainstream platform.