Headphones and watches in one! Aipower plays cross-border wearables earlier than Huawei: new products are here again

On December 1, many media and big V said that Huawei will release Watch Buds, a two-in-one product of watch + earphones in December 2022. This is a brand new category in digital products. One product can serve two purposes.

According to the editor's understanding, Huawei is not the pioneer of the two-in-one watch + earphone product. Its creator is the Shenzhen innovative digital Aipower brand. Its cross-border smart wearable product Wearbuds was launched on various crowdfunding websites as early as 2019, and Achieved nearly one million dollars in sales. After several years of iterative development, the Wearbuds product line has gradually enriched, including Wearbuds Life with a clearer screen and Wearbuds Watch in the form of a watch. In addition, the latest Wearbuds Watch Pro will be released soon.

At present, the editor has not obtained the relevant technical details of these two products, but it can be confirmed that Aipower's Wearbuds Watch Pro and Huawei's Watch Buds have the same product idea, and the core is to integrate the two products of the watch and the earphone , Consumers buying one product is equivalent to having the functions of two products, and it is more convenient to carry at the same time.

In fact, Huawei has tried to make this kind of cross-border products earlier. The Huawei Band B6 is a smart wearable device that integrates earphones and bracelets. Users can take off the body and wear it directly. However, this product still has some shortcomings. For example, there is only one earphone, and the application scenarios are almost limited to answering calls, and the price is more expensive than conventional bracelet products.

The original intention of the 2-in-1 product is to be portable. On the other hand, the product form is novel enough to attract enough attention. But in the editor’s opinion, cross-border products are often accompanied by compromises. The earphones will occupy a lot of internal space of the watch, and manufacturers will also make the earphones smaller in order to minimize the impact on the watch space. The result of this is that the battery of the watch is not large, and it is difficult to guarantee battery life, while the original sound generator of the earphone will be small, resulting in a greater difference in sound quality compared to conventional TWS earphones.

To put it simply, a cross-border product is a product that implements two functions, but the performance of the two functions is not necessarily better than that of a single product. The editor gives another example of a 2-in-1 product. The product concept of Microsoft Surface 2-in-1 computer is very good, taking into account the productivity of Windows, and at the same time it can be as portable as a tablet computer. The problem is that the performance release of this 2-in-1 computer is very general, and there are few interfaces, sacrificing too much practicality of Windows for portability. If it is not for the ultimate portability, Surface is actually not suitable for starting.

Similarly, the editor believes that the core of the watch + earphone is portability, and it can do more things, but the expectation for a single function may be lowered, depending on the actual performance of Huawei Watch Buds and Aipower Waerbuds Watch Pro.