Omate Rise is a 3G-enabled Android watch with a regular SIM card

Peter, 01 December, 2015

Early this year Omate showed off some smartwatches, including the 2G-enabled Roma. Those weren’t Android Wear watches though. Now the company is back with the Omate Rise – a 3G-enabled Android (not Wear, full Android) watch.

Unlike the latest crop of smartwatches, this one uses a regular SIM card – a microSIM, not even nano. Great news if your carrier doesn’t yet support the e-SIMs used by the likes of the Samsung Gear S2. Also, the chipset supports 1,900MHz (US) and 2,100MHz (EU) 3G bands, plus quad-band 2G/EDGE.

The Rise will be offered for pre-order on December 7 with a unique 48-hour IndieGoGo promotion. Super Early Bird and Early Bird backers will get a free Bluetooth Heart Rate Monitor (by Nordic Semiconductor), which normally costs $50. The watch itself does not have a heart rate sensor.

Prices for the watch will be $200 and $210 for the first 500 backers of each Early Bird deal, the full retail price is expected to be $350 when the watch launches at the end of March.

The Omate Rise features a fully round 1.3" display (360 x 360px) with sapphire coating. The screen is surrounded by a carbon fiber bezel –the reason for the IndieGoGo campaign, the company needs $30,000 to buy the tooling to manufacture it.

The watch is powered by MediaTek MT2601 chipset (dual-core Cortex-A7 and Mali-400) with 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage. Connectivity and sensors include Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, microphone + loudspeaker and, of course, 3G. The battery is good for two days of use. It has 580mAh capacity.

The watch is rated at 1 ATM water resistance and features replaceable 22mm bands. The Rise runs Android 5.1 Lollipop with Omate OUI 4.0 on top (it's compatible with Android 4.3+ and iOS 9+). Omate has already open sourced its code at XDA-Developers so devs can play with it.

Again, the IndieGoGo campaign starts Monday, December 7 at 10am New York time and will run for only 48 hours. If you want one, it's best to get one of the Early Bird deals – for the price cut and for the heart rate monitor, later units will be pricier and you'll have to bring your own HR sensor.

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