This smartwatch brings Amazon's Alexa to your wrist

When Chinese company iMCO launched a crowdfunding campaign for its smartwatch by the name CoWatch this April, it generated quite a lot of buzz. Interestingly, it isn’t the watch’s hardware but its software integrated with Alexa that’s the USP of the product.

The smartwatch that opened for sale on Amazon yesterday puts Amazon's Alexa as a personal assistant on your smartwatch for the first time. The body of the CoWatch is made entirely of stainless steel with a single physical button on the side that turns the display on and off. With a long press, it also brings up the settings menu of the watch. The display is a 1.39-inch touchscreen, AMOLED display with a resolution of 400 x 400.

An Ingenic dual-core chipset, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage is perhaps the most one will see in any wearable. With a standard battery life, the CoWatch offers a basic set of sensors needed for fitness tracking, including an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and even optical heart rate sensors.

The CoWatch runs on an Android-based OS called Cronologics, made by former Googlers and Android engineers who have been developing the smartwatch-specific software platform since 2014. It pairs with either iOS or Android smartphones. But with Cronologics OS, all of the computing happens either on the watch itself or in the cloud, which means the smartwatch wouldn't be totally reliant on the smartphone in order to work.

But the real cool part is, of course, Alexa. You invoke her by holding down the crown button or tapping an Alexa complication on the screen and then use it for answering your queries or for ordering something online.

The smartwatch surely looks promising and you can try one as it's already available on Amazon with prices starting at $279.