Misfit has announced its first smartwatch with a touchscreen called Vapor at CES 2017. The Fossil Group, which owns Misfit and several other premium watch brands has announced plans to double its smartwatch offerings this year.
Misfit Vapor features a 1.4-inch AMOLED display and is based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 2100 platform. The smartwatch comes with built-in GPS, optical heart rate sensor and 4GB onboard memory for storing music. Misfit has launched analog smartwatches in the past including Shine 2 and Phase, which offer months long battery life but Vapor comes with only two-day battery life.
An interesting addition is something called touch bezel, a thin strip of display placed around the face. The touch bezel is meant to simplify user interaction like the rotating bezel on the Gear S2 and the digital crown on the Apple Watch.
"Fossil Group’s design, scale, speed to market and unrivaled portfolio of fashion brands, coupled with our cloud and app platform, and tech and hardware innovation, have pulled us ahead of the wearables pack," said Greg McKelvey, chief strategy and digital officer, Fossil Group.
Misfit Vapor arrives at a time when major smartwatch makers are abandoning the category altogether due to lacklustre response. A recent Gartner report suggested that smartwatches have a high rate of abandonment and Pebble has sold its software assets to Fitbit. However, Misfit and its parent Fossil Group are serious about the category and plan to ship Vapor in late 2017 for $199.