New $1,800 TAG Heuer smartwatch is the price of four Apple Watches

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  The TAG Heuer Connected. [credit: TAG Heuer ]

TAG Heuer is not giving up on Wear OS, having just launched a third generation of the ludicrously expensive TAG Heuer Connected. The new model is $1,800, or about the price of four Apple Watches.

While most Wear OS devices are starved for viable hardware options when it comes to the SoC, TAG Heuer's exorbitant prices have let it experiment with exotic options in the past. The two previous versions have been powered by Intel Atom processors. This new version just houses a regular old (and we do mean "old") Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100. Qualcomm is really the only company selling smartwatch chips to device manufacturers, but Qualcomm also doesn't seem to care about the smartwatch market. The company hasn't released a significant update to its smartwatch chips since the original Android watches came out in 2014. Qualcomm has released products with new names, like the Snapdragon Wear 2100 and the Snapdragon Wear 3100, but they all have similar architecture and will benchmark similarly to Qualcomm's first Snapdragon 400-equipped smartwatches that launched six years ago. Naturally, this unprecedented lack of progress for a tech product has killed the Wear OS market.

Other specs include a 1.39-inch 454×454 OLED display, a 430mAh battery, Wi-Fi, NFC, GPS, water resistance, and a heart-rate sensor. As far as the "smart" parts of the smartwatch, you can get all this in a $300 Fossil watch. Previous versions of the TAG Heuer Connected were modular, meaning you could supposedly rip out the smartwatch guts someday and replace them with traditional watch parts. This new version does not seem to have an upgrade feature.

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