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  • We're still a week away from Xiaomi's November 5th event and the company has decided to "leak" more information about its upcoming smartwatch through its Weibo account.

Xiaomi, one of China's main players in the smartphone market, might be about to expand its wearable portfolio by creating a smartwatch based on WearOS. According to an official teaser image posted to Weibo, a rectangular smartwatch that could pass for an Apple Watch will be announced next week.

Per IDC, Xiaomi currently occupies the second position in the global wearable market with a 12.6% share, with most of its growth fueled by fitness trackers such as its Mi Band 3. After releasing the Mi Band 4 activity tracker earlier this year, Xiaomi seems ready to move upmarket into the smartwatch territory.

As spotted by WinFuture, Xiaomi has released a teaser image on Weibo of what looks like a smartwatch that closely resembles the Apple Watch series in design. It has a rectangular outline with rounded corners and included is a beveled rotating crown on the upper-right side. On the software front, it will most likely run on WearOS, based on 9to5Google's analysis of Google's code.

As for what it's going to be called, "Mi Watch" seems most likely seeing as that term is present in the WearOS 2.28 code. We'll know for sure next week on November 5th.

UPDATE: 2019/10/29 12:37pm PDT BY DAVID OH

We're still a week away from Xiaomi's November 5th event and the company has decided to "leak" more information about its upcoming smartwatch through its Weibo account.

These images leave little doubt that Xiaomi was indeed very "inspired" by the Apple Watch — the general shape, the way the strap attaches to the body, the location of the rotating crown and the button underneath it, and even the locations of the microphone and speaker cutouts, are all oddly familiar.

Although Xiaomi's press images seem to support the theory that the watch is based on WearOS, a purported picture of the Xiaomi watch posted to slashleaks creates a little bit of doubt about the underlying OS. If that image is truly indicative of final software, then it may not be running WearOS at all, or possibly using WearOS in some modified form, which Google formally doesn't allow. We'll know for sure on November 5th.

Besides the design, we also got to learn more about what's inside the watch: WiFi and Bluetooth support, GPS, NFC, eSIM, Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100, a linear haptic motor, and a speaker.

Pictures of the upcoming watch weren't the only thing Xiaomi shared on Weibo. It also revealed more information about the camera capabilities of its upcoming flagship smartphone called the Xiaomi Mi CC9 Pro, which we're expecting to be sold globally as the Xiaomi Mi Note 10. The CC9 Pro comes equipped with five cameras: a telephoto camera capable of up to 50x digital zoom, a 12MP depth sensor for enhanced selfie shots, a 108MP primary camera with f/1.7 aperture, a 20MP wide-angle camera, and a dedicated macro camera for close-up shots.

Both products are set for official launch in China on November 5th, 2019.

UPDATE: 2019/10/30 2:18pm PDT BY DAVID OH

Xiaomi can't seem to stop sharing information about its upcoming smartwatch ahead of its launch event only six days away. Today's additions to its Weibo account have revealed the name of the underlying watch OS: it will be called MIUI for Watch and the watch will have its own dedicated app store.

The second video shows the watch in action as the user smoothly rotates the crown to browse through rows of apps before tapping on the screen.

[video width="640" height="360" mp4="https://www.androidpolice.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019-10-30-Xiaomi-Mi-Watch-02.mp4"]

The existence of a watch app store was revealed by the caption in the picture below that roughly translates to "a real smartwatch has its own app store." By developing its own watch OS and accompanying app store, Xiaomi joins Samsung in distancing itself from Google's WearOS ecosystem.

With so much information already revealed about Xiaomi's upcoming watch, we wonder if there will be any surprises left.

Source: Weibo: (1), (2), (3), (4), 9to5Google

Via: WinFuture