Omate was among the first companies to start developing premium untethered smartwatches that had their own sim cards and worked without needing a phone.


On August 20th, Omate announced its first notification watch, a watch that essentially acted as a second phone screen; it pushes notifications to and from Android and iOS devices and has a number of built-in apps, such as an alarm, phonebook, and music player.


Omate’s concept and design seemed to work on paper, but a mediocre screen and laggy software are perhaps why you should invest in a Moto 360 smartwatch instead.


The Omate X is equipped with fairly modest hardware: a MediaTek ARM7 processor with 128MB of RAM. It has a 1.54 inch TFT display with 240×240 resolution. It comes with a built-in speaker, camera, gyroscope, and microphone. Omate claimed one week of power on a single charge with its 400mAh battery.

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Omate X is equipped with fairly modest hardware

What we found to be really inconvenient was how the screen automatically turned off after a short time, we constantly needed to manually activate it to look at the time. Not a deal breaker but it’s something you’ll find very annoying if you’re one of those people who need to glance at the time twice before actually knowing what the time is. Additionally, the screen was prone to smudges and fingerprints, which we didn’t find in any other high-end smartwatches.


The Omate X runs on a custom software platform that functions on both Android and iOS. It uses MediaTek’s Aster (MT2502) platform that was somewhat laggy when going from screen to screen, conceivably because the software is still in its early stages.


The Omate X’s build quality is the real selling point here, the Pebble Steel design is actually very good; it’s metal and the straps are made of genuine leather.

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Omate X’s strength lies in the design

The Omate X is available for pre-orders from September 1st to September 30th for a reasonable 129$ (€99). It’s expected to start production around mid-October.

