Huawei announces the 4.5G Smartband

At the moment wearables haven’t really grown up and become independent from smartphones, since they still rely on them for a large number of their useful functions. Even 3G-enabled devices like the Samsung Gear S aren’t truly independent from their smartphone cousins. Huawei’s Smartband has no such limitation.

The Smartband also happens to run on Huawei’s recently announced ‘4.5G’ network, which offers speeds faster than of a standard 4G network and is supposed to start rolling out later this year.

Sadly we have no idea what the Smartband will actually do, other than the fact Huawei claims the processor will allow it to connect to the ‘cellular internet of things’. If it’s anything like the previously released Huawei Talkband B1, we should expect hands free communication along with all the fitness and notification features present on most smartwatches.

Huawei expects that its 4.5G network will be able to reach speeds up to 1GBps. This is a long way off the 10GBps speeds estimated to be available on 5G, but it’s twice as fast as the 450MBps offered by Cat10 4G. The idea is that 4.5G will be as reliable as cable broadband, and the low latency will allow smart devices to talk to each other without any noticeable delay.

The Smartband is there to help individuals connect into that network and communicate with the world around them. Sadly, we don’t have much information on when Huawei will be releasing the Smartband, or how the 4.5G network is going to start rolling out later this year

Huawei is guaranteed to have a presence at MWC, so maybe we’ll hear a little bit more about both the Smartband and 4.5G next week.