Casio preparing to enter the smartwatch field

The smartwatch industry has a new player ready to enter, this time coming from the world of watchmakers hoping to add some “smarts” to its devices instead of a tech company looking to cram smarts into a watch form factor. Casio has revealed plans to produce a smartwatch for release in 2016. With the company’s history, the move to finally get into the market should probably not be a surprise.

In the past Casio has managed to tack on all sorts of technology and gadgets on its watches. These have ranged from the now seemingly mundane calculator to heart-rate monitors, digital cameras, and even portable gaming systems. Casio’s new president, Kazuhiro Kashio, admits that, “at times we just showed off with quirky features and then pulled those products when they didn’t sell well.”

Despite the success and failure of past devices from Casio, the company does have a solid history of understanding consumers in the watch marketplace and their desire for something easy to use, durable, and a pleasure to wear.

Kashio, who recently took over leadership at Casio from his father, has been leading a team for the past four years working on the smartwatch device. He says he has already rejected a variety of prototypes as not meeting his requirements. Whatever eventually hits the market, currently scheduled for March 2016, Kashio expects it to be priced in the $400 range.

Kashio says the initial sales target will be around $80 million from smartwatch devices. Overall watch sales for Casio totaled $1.2 billion for the year ended March 2015 and accounted for about half of the company’s sales.

source: Wall Street Journal

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