CES 2019: Kate Spade Scallop 2 is a better health and fitness companion
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At last year’s CES, Kate Spade New York launched its first ever touchscreen smartwatch for women called Scallop. This year it’s back at Las Vegas with the second generation iteration. Scallop 2 comes with quite a few improvements under the hood including heart rate, GPS and NFC.
Essential reading: Top smartwatches for women, stylish timepieces built for small wrists
Fossil is continuing on its journey of churning out hybrids and WearOS smartwatches left, right and centre. In the past few days it’s announced both the Kate Spade Scallop Smartwatch 2 Collection and the new Michael Kors Access Sofie. Although the watches are aimed for fashionistas, they inherit Fossil Generation 4 technology which makes them much more viable health and fitness companions.
The Scallop 2 collection delivers pretty much the same design as the original, but with some welcome performance and sensor upgrades. This includes the most obvious omission from the first version – a heart rate monitor, along with built-in GPS for phone free training and 3 ATM water resistance for swimming.
The new timepiece slaps on NFC for Google Pay and comes out of the box with the latest version of Wear OS. There’s a built-in microphone for Google Assistant and you can play music from your smartphone, too. To round things off, the watch dishes out notifications and social media updates and some pretty nifty animations.
Unfortunately, just like the new Michael Kors collection, Scallop 2 is powered by the same old Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100 rather than Wear 3100. Expect battery life therefore to be between 1 and 2 days.
Just like on the original, there are three designs to choose from. One has a gold case and black leather band, the other two rose gold cases with a pink leather or polished stainless-steel five-link bracelet. They all come with a scalloped edge around the watch face (hence the name) and the logo engraved on the watch’s crown. The watch is available in a 42mm case with a crown on the right hand side to cycle through menus and a button below that opens up the customizable watch face functionality.
Pricing starts at $295 for the leather strap version and $335 for the metal variant. Scallop 2 should be available later in January.
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