Asus ZenWatch

» see zenwatch.asus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Asus showed the ZenWatch at IFA in Berlin on 3 September 2014 and put it on sale in November at 199 dollars, undercutting every other Android Wear watch on the shelf. It was a curved rectangle of stainless steel carrying a 1.63 inch AMOLED at 320 by 320, with a leather strap that made it look more expensive than it was. Battery life was a day, which in 2014 counted as normal rather than as a complaint.

Two more followed. The ZenWatch 2 in 2015 came in two sizes and went cheaper again. The ZenWatch 3 arrived on 11 November 2016 with a round face and a price back up around 229 dollars. Each one was a competent piece of hardware, and each one shipped into a category that kept failing to explain itself to buyers.

On 15 May 2017 the supply chain press in Taipei reported that Asus was dropping the line, citing shipments of five to six thousand units a month across the whole family. Asus did not confirm it and did not deny it, and there was never a farewell post or a support notice. The company went on selling VivoWatch health bands afterward, so the exit was from Google's watch platform specifically. It was carried out by quietly not making another one.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ five thousand a month ~

Five to six thousand units a month is the number worth sitting with. Asus was at the time shipping millions of phones a year and tens of millions of motherboards, and the ZenWatch never got past the volume of a mid-sized accessory brand. For a company built on component economics, a product that cannot fill a production run never graduates out of being a research project with a retail box.

Asus in Turkey meant motherboards. If you built your own machine in the 2000s and posted your parts list in a forum signature on donanimhaber or frmtr, an Asus board was in it more often than not, and the name carried the specific authority of a component that did not surprise you. A watch from the same company was a strange object to encounter, because none of that reputation transferred to something you wore. It sat on Turkish shelves at a price close to a decent phone and mostly stayed there.

~ the platform underneath ~

The ZenWatch did not die alone. Android Wear launched in 2014 with a partner list that read like the whole industry, and within three years Motorola had stopped making them and Samsung had gone off to build Tizen watches instead. Google renamed the platform Wear OS in 2018, by which point the original partner roster was mostly gone. Asus was one of several companies that concluded, at almost the same moment, that shipping somebody else's watch software was not a business.

What survives is a small population of ZenWatches in drawers, running a version of Android Wear that stopped receiving updates in 2017 and pairing with phones that no longer speak the same protocol. The ZenWatch 3 got its Android Wear 2.0 update in May 2017, the same month the reporting said the line was finished.

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