Olio Model One Smartwatch
- A luxury smartwatch from a company that no longer exists
- But their nifty demo sites still exist: Steel | Black | Gold | Rose Gold
- Made with high-quality components with ludicrous descriptions like, “Cold-forged nine times for hardness,” and “Sapphire and ion-exchange glass that has gone through our custom guilloché texturing process”
- Pairs with iOS and Android devices via Bluetooth and an app, like most smartwatches
- Is mostly good at managing notifications, but does it in a cool way
- There are risks to buying an unsupported smartwatch – no customer support, for example – but at this discount we think they’re justified
- At worst you end up with a fancy-ass watch that’s just a watch
- Pretty large, or a “boyfriend watch” if we’re trying to convince the female set to buy it
- Model: H1B-SKU-01 - H1B-SKU-15 excluding -12 (The “12” watch — H1B-SKU-12 – was lost long ago, at the dawning of the Second Age. Lost forever, some thought. But then…)
One Man's Trash Is Another Meh Treasure
When we heard somebody was sitting on a pile of these luxury Olio smartwatches, our eyes lit up. Why? Because Olio has gone out of business. Where lesser retailers might worry about the problems with selling a product from a defunct company, we saw an opportunity:
We could sell a hecka nice wristwatch at a hecka low price — it just might not do all the things it was originally designed to.
Olio was part of the initial smartwatch explosion and positioned itself to compete as the “luxury” alternative to the Apple Watch. That meant it was expensive (starting at $595), featured good build quality and fashion-forward looks, and had a pompous “trailer” that felt like Silicon-Valley-style self-parody.
Then Olio achieved that goal of all young startups and failed fast, putting their remaining inventory out to pasture. We got these for a crazy low price because nobody knew what to do with them. And, let’s be real, a smartwatch that is no longer supported by the company that created them is not an easy sell.
(They already don’t perform some of their marketed features, like providing weather updates, but the core of the software (which we’ll get to) still works.)
But here’s the crux: Even if all the “smart” features eventually failed, these are still good enough “dumb” watches in their own right to make them a good deal at this price. They have a great build quality, look better than most watches at this price, and who knows — you might be able to recoup the value of the gold ones just by melting them down.
Meh was born to sell crap like this because we can explain the complicated tradeoffs. Other stores would just be selling a watch that didn’t do all the things it professed to.
What Olio professed to do, and still does for the most part, is manage notifications. It doesn’t try to act like a miniature version of your phone, it mostly organizes and prioritizes your notifications so you can stay on top of all your important business without pulling your phone out every few minutes. It connects to iPhones and Android devices via an app (and Bluetooth). The app doesn’t require a central server, which means it still runs without anyone behind the wheel. And the App Store should support the app for the next two years.
That said, we want to temper your expectations. It’s best to think of this as simply a nice watch, and any other functions it performs are bonus. At press time most of its smart capabilities are operational, but should things go wrong there’s nobody in the customer support center to support you, customer. You can consider it the Wild West of smartwatch ownership, but we’d push you to think of it as the Tamed East of regular watch ownership, and you might get to watch a John Wayne movie.
How’s that analogy doing? Struggling?
The point is: We saw intrinsic value in these watches. They’re really nice watches. The fact that they perform other feats that may fail in the future doesn’t affect that value. That’s what “intrinsic” means … we think.
The more important point is: If you buy these and in two years they stop giving you Slack notifications, you’re not allowed to complain.
