Citizen temporarily suspends sales of its second-generation CZ Smart watch due to a “technical issue.” The Wear OS watch, which launched in May, had a feature based on technology from IBM’s Watson and NASA to track a person’s alertness.
It seems that the decision is due to negative experiences from critics. Michael Fisher, better known as MrMobile on YouTube, noted that Citizen said it would suspend sales after contacting the company about numerous issues with the watch. This was corroborated by a cabling historyin which reviewer Julian Chokkattu also detailed various bugs, such as laggy displays, poor battery life, inaccurate tracking, and watch faces that can’t even tell the correct time.
“We are investigating the issue, recalling models under review, and will temporarily suspend sales of touchscreen models while we identify the source of the issue and the best path toward a resolution for our customers and partners,” Citizen wrote in an email to the reviewers. including a real server.
Affected models include MX1003-71X, MX1000-28X, MX1000-01X, MX1000-52X, MX1005-83X, MX1002-57X, MX1018-06X, MX1017-50X, MX1010-59X, MX1011-05X and MX1016-2 8X. . According cablingthis does not affect the CZ Smart Hybrid.
Last week I started testing the second generation Citizen CZ Smart and I can confirm that my experience was similar to that of Fisher, Chokkattu and 9to5Google. In fact, I was writing an email to fix the problem because I thought I had a bunk. Several outdoor runs I’d followed couldn’t find a GPS fix, froze mid-workout, and ended up not being able to log a workout. A two mile run I logged earlier this week logged as 0.1 mile with a pace of about 93 minutes per mile. (I’m not the fastest runner, but I’m not that slow either.)
Screens would freeze, crash, or not register hits regularly. Yesterday, I took the watch off the charger with a 100 percent battery around noon, and by 10:30 pm it only had 6 percent left. I also had a lot of trouble syncing my data as the watch couldn’t keep the connection to my phone even when they were side by side.
The problems got worse in the last two or three days. Initially, my watch had laggy displays, but at least I could open menus and receive notifications fairly reliably. Now I can’t even do that anymore; felt like a Wear OS experience circa 2016.
The last time I can remember a smartwatch having so many problems was the OnePlus Watch – but that was a pre-production model. It’s somewhat surprising in this case, too, as the second-gen CZ Smart has a Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100 chip that we’ve seen in other Wear OS 3 smartwatches like the Fossil Gen 6. Ultimately, it’s a good thing Citizen is pausing the sales. . What is less good is that several disgruntled citizen customers They were reporting similar problems from three months ago.
I reached out to Citizen to clarify what recourse existing customers will have, how long the suspension will last, and more details about the technical issues in question, but did not immediately receive a response.
