Casio’s new rugged smartwatch is made for the outdoors

Four colors, two LCD screens: what more do you need? Photo: Casio

Four colors, two LCD screens: what more do you need? Photo: Casio

Cult of Mac CES 2016 full coverageCasio has been making watches since the 1970s, so it comes as no surprise that their new product, revealed on stage at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, is a smart watch.

The new not-so-cleverly-named WSD-F10 runs Android Wear for it’s OS, is water resistant up to 50 meters, and has a cool dual-layer LCD face, one monochrome and energy saving, the other full color and gorgeous. This new smartwatch for the outdoorsy should arrive in stores this coming April.

“We’re about lifestyle – everything we manufacture, we put lifestyle first,” said Vice President of Casio America, David Johnson.

Casio has always been a leader in new wrist-based tech, from the CasioTron in 1974, to the nerd-tastic Casio calculator watch of the 1980s and the later sensor and music playing watches. The new WSD-F10 is a surprisingly cool-looking blend of Android Wear smart watch functionality and a ton of sensors that make sense for the outdoor enthusiast.

Those sensors will give you one-button access to tons of outdoor features like compass readings, air pressure, altitude, sunrise and sunset times, tide graphs, activity graphs, and more. There are several built-in apps, including MyRadar, ViewRanger, Runkeeper, Yamap, plus all the joy of the Google app ecosystem on your wrist.

Really, though, it’s that dual-layered watch face that’s the big deal. You’ve got one monochromatic LCD screen layered atop a full color LCD screen, letting you save a ton of battery when just needing to see the time and other basic informational complications. When you need the full color of a modern smartwatch like Apple Watch, though, you can. What a great bit of tech.

The end price will be $500, according to Johnson, and will be available in four colors–red, green, orange, and black–in April 2016.