Why Buy An Apple Watch In March For $349 When You Can Get One Now For $27?
If you’re a technophile and you’ve got an iPhone, you’ve no doubt been waiting with bated breath to find out exactly when the Apple Watch will go on sale. Well, now it appears that we know almost exactly: You can probably pick up an Apple Watch starting in March for $349. But you could also just pick up something similar right now for $27.
There’s just one catch.
The $27 Apple Watch, as you might have guessed, is totally a knockoff, and it’s not even called the Apple Watch. The impostor watch comes from a Shenzhen-based company called Hyperdon, and Hyperdon has dubbed its Apple Watch clone the Smart Watch. No points for originality, there, but one almost has to award points for the brazen nature of Hyperdon’s Apple-copying.
Along with seemingly everything else in tech news this week – including 50 Cent’s Star Wars musings and Samsung’s Avengers: Age of Ultron tech – Hyperdon’s Apple Watch homage was on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Mashable’s Karissa Bell got her hands on the device, noting that it “almost looks like the real deal – at least, upon first glance.” There’s a definite air of cheapness to the Smart Watch, and that’s no surprise, Hyperdon is selling the thing at wholesale for $27.
What does that $27 – well, actually $30, as Bell found out after a trip to the cash machine – get you? Aside from a few “Is that an Apple Watch… Oh” reactions from your friends, the device also comes with the ability to pair with an iPhone. Once paired, one can make phone calls and play music through the watch. It also vibrates when the paired phone has an incoming call.
The Apple Watch clone also comes with a pedometer, stopwatch, alarm, and something Bell says is called “Anti lost,” a feature that likely causes either the Smart Watch or a user’s iPhone to vibrate when the two devices are out of Bluetooth range of each other.
Where can you get this Apple Watch copy? Well, that’s a bit harder to answer. Hyperdon says that it sells its products at retail stores in the U.S. and China, but it didn’t go into details on where. If we had to guess, the words “kiosk,” “bargain,” and “bin” would probably be somewhere in our answer, though we wouldn’t rule out “alley,” “trunk,” and “rusty van,” as well.
If you’re not too keen on picking up Hyperdon’s version of the Apple Watch, you’ll be happy to know that it’s probably only going to be a few weeks before the real version hits stores. Word has it that Apple is preparing to launch the Apple Watch in March of this year. 9to5Mac, probably the most reliable insider site for Apple news, says that Apple is already gearing up to train retail employees in the use and sale of the Apple Watch, and the company is reportedly working overtime to get the Apple Watch’s operating system, interface, and battery life up to snuff.
Just what can you expect to pay for the Apple Watch when the real version hits store shelves? We know already that the baseline metal and glass sport models will start at $349. Apple may price the stainless steel and sapphire crystal models at around $500. If you’re looking to snag one of the prettier versions, though, get ready to have your wallet take a hit: the gold editions of the Apple Watch could very well cost into the thousands of dollars. That $27 version maybe doesn’t look so bad now, does it? Just kidding; of course it does.
