Although it was suspected that Meta had axed all plans to make their wearable around 8 months ago, new photos show that the watch’s design has now entered a more advanced stage, suggesting a fleshed-out V2 that’s probably inching closer to a finished product. Revealed by Twitter user Kuba Wojciechowski, this new iteration confirms all our previous suggestions, including a detachable module featuring a watch face on the front with a notch and a front-facing camera, and a secondary, larger camera at the back that lets people record POV videos and BeReal-style picture-in-picture content.
Image Credits: Kuba Wojciechowski
The images show a rounded-square-shaped device running a watch face, with a pretty sizeable bezel containing a notch and a front-facing camera. The watch shape feels rather odd because it’s neither square nor circular, sitting somewhere in between. I imagine designing the UI for such a device would be weird, given that you can’t really watch videos in such a rounded-square display anymore, making it hard to consume content from Meta’s social media sites at Facebook, Instagram, and its chatting app WhatsApp. There are, however, two buttons on the side of the device, although it’s tough to say what their function is at this point.
The one set of details that still remains, however, is the presence of dual cameras. The front-facing camera eats into the display, while the rear camera (slightly larger) hovers right above a bulge that contains what I assume are the heart-rate sensors. You’ve even got contact pins on the other side that I assume are for charging purposes.
There aren’t too many details about the device’s build and specs, although Kuba mentions that it isn’t running Google’s WearOS, but rather a fork of its open-source Android OS. Facebook has for long played with the idea of building their own ecosystem and app network to escape the monopolies of Apple and Google, and this could just be it. There’s also a Qualcomm chipset on the inside, although it isn’t mentioned which one, and the outer case and band are still to be revealed to the public, although we did put together our own concept just about a year ago, right before it was suspected that work on the wearable had halted indefinitely.
Earlier last year, we covered the Meta Watch too, bringing life to its speculative patent-file images through renderings. If you want to read our coverage on the band from last year, click here.
