MEXICO CITY—Some two years after Huawei shipped one of the weirder gadget-fusion concepts we’ve seen—a smartwatch that carries and charges its own wireless earbuds in an interior compartment—a Reebok-branded smartwatch on display here at the Electronics Home Mexico expo offers the same idea at a much lower price.

While Huawei’s Watch Buds, which shipped in the spring of 2023, stow their earbuds under a watch screen that pops up, the Reebok Watch EB tucks them into individual compartments on one side. Seeing this combination gadget here, I had to take a look. 

The immediate attraction for local shoppers: the price tag. The Huawei smartwatch retails for 9,999 pesos on Amazon’s site here (about $525); the Reebok timepiece is 1,976 pesos ($104). 

And unlike Huawei, which has been under a years-long commercial ban by the US government, the Reebok distributed by a local firm, Life Works, could theoretically make it to the US.

“I’m working to have it in the US,” product manager Julio Faz said in a show-floor conversation, adding that this would require Reebok’s US division to sign off on a co-branding deal. He quoted an even lower price, 1,099 pesos, but couldn’t explain why Amazon would charge almost twice as much. The watch, manufactured in China, went on sale in Mexico in January, then in other Latin American markets in May.

It features a 2.01-inch screen, IP67 water and dust resistance, a heart-rate sensor on the back, and a 345mAh battery that its label says can charge the earbuds for 6 hours of talk. That kind of battery life would be pretty good for Bluetooth earbuds at any price; JLab’s JBuds Mini, our pick for under-$50 models, tout a battery life of 5.5 hours.

Remember to tuck the earpod into that charging compartment. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)

The watch runs an unspecified flavor of Google’s Wear OS–the version running on the display unit was customized so extensively that the About screen in its system settings did not identify the software as Wear OS. To compound the software mystery a bit, the manual directs customers to download a third-party app to sync the watch to a phone. 

Extracting the small stowed earbuds from their compartments of a show-floor demo unit that was notably chunkier than other Android watches required some dainty work with my fingernails. 

Faz offered the Spotify app on his phone for a quick audition; I had to pick Wall of Voodoo’s “Mexican Radio,” then discovered that the earbuds had little bass response, leaving that 1982 synth-rock classic sounding tinny. Phone calls seem like a better use case.

As much as the Lego-esque nature of this watch-plus-earbuds combination intrigued me, the sketchy nature of the software would leave me uneasy. But I did have to give the designers credit for going out of their way to address one of the more common problems with tiny wireless earbuds: losing track of them after listening to them.

Disclosure: I traveled here with a group of other North American journalists as guests of the show’s organizers, who covered our travel expenses.

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About Rob Pegoraro

Contributor

Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.

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