In a sad news for wearable industry, Lenovo Moto yesterday confirmed that it has no plans to release the next Moto 360 or any other smartwatch in near future, reports The Verge. 
Shakil Barkat, head of global product development at Moto, said the company doesn’t “see enough pull in the market to put [a new smartwatch] out at this time,â€. However, Shakil did mention that the company might launch a new smartwatch but that is not likely to happen anytime in near future or let’s say in the first half of 2017.
Further, Barkat said – “Wearables do not have broad enough appeal for us to continue to build on it year after year,” . Co-incidentally, this announcement has come just days after the IDC report which revealed a whopping 51 percent decline in smartwatch market.
Motorola (read Lenovo) earlier announced that it will not be releasing the next generation of Moto 360 in 2016 and now the company has further extended the statement to an undefined date. Even Google delayed its Android Wear 2.0 launch from this year to early next year.
Well, Lenovo has a point here to make. Smartwatches haven’t grown on us the way these OEMs expected and somewhere down the line, they lost their importance as a smartphone accessory. This can also be blamed to the limited functionality a smartwatch offers. However, a chunk of users would surely get disappointed with this announcement as Moto 360 was one of the best in the business and it also came with an affordable price.
Closing out the statement, Barkat told The Verge – “We believe the wrist still has value and there will be a point where they provide value to consumers more than they do today,â€
And we hope that time comes soon so that more OEMs enter the smartwatch market with different price points.