LG developing webOS-based smart watch

It’s been a good week for the company formerly known as Palm, with LG Electronics revealing at CES 2015 that it is developing a smart watch running webOS – the mobile platform developed by Palm.

While LG doesn’t seem to have made any formal announcements on the product, it has been showing it off at the show, with androidcentral and the WSJ both chatting to unnamed insiders there. The watch is also a collaboration with Audi, which seems to have contributed an app that allows you to do things like unlock a paired car with the watch.

The reason for the low profile is that this webOS watch is still very much a prototype, with actual launches not expected for at least a year. This is consistent with an underlying trend of trying to introduce new smart platforms outside of the relatively mature smartphone sector, as shown by Samsung preferring to use the Tizen platform for smart watches and TVs instead.

Speaking of Samsung Electronics, its quarterly numbers continue to go in the wrong direction thanks to its rapidly declining global smartphone share. In preliminary earnings guidance it said it expected Q4 2014 sales to come in around KRW 52 trillion and operating profit to be KRW 5.2 trillion. As you can see from the table below, those will be down from revenues of almost KRW 60 trillion and profit of over KRW 7 trillion a year ago.

Samsung Electronics’ Revenues Peaked A Year Ago