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Casio has decided to follow some of their contemporaries — namely Tag Heuer — and jump into the smart watch arena. Casio’s first Android Wear device stays true to the company’s love for building rugged products. The screws lodged into each corner of the chassis do well enough to remind us that it can take a beating.
And it’s more than just looks — it’s MIL-810 certified, so if you find yourself having to swim in up to 50 meters in water with it on, you can do it. We reckon it should also be able to take quite the beating when dropped or hit by small debris, otherwise it wouldn’t be fit for use on a battlefield (not that many of you are going to be using it in nearly those same conditions, of course).
Casio has gone with an interesting approach to battery life. When you need to squeeze more life out of it you can go into a monochrome LCD mode that lasts days at a time, though it only manages to tell the time in that mode. You can disengage that for a full color, full-blown Android Wear experience if battery life isn’t of concern.
Casio’s watch features a number of different watch faces which make sense for the outdoorsy people it’s geared toward. You can check current altitude, air pressure, compass direction, tide graphs, sunrise and sunset times and more from any given watch face.
It’s a hefty beast, and that also comes with a hefty price tag: $500. That’s not as hard to swallow as the $1,500 Tag Heuer option, of course, but it’s still sure to cause some shock for those who find it hard to go far beyond $300. That said, Casio is betting that it’ll be worth it for those who have been waiting for something like this, and with no one else really challenging them in the rugged smart watch game right now we’d say it’s not too risky a move. The device is set to launch at some point in April.
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