Updated: We received confirmation from Huawei's representatives that the watch does not have NFC.
For a few hours, it seemed that Huawei Watch owners had hit the jackpot. It was reported that the company was exploring ways to turn on a dormant NFC chip following the Android Wear 2.0 update, thus making it the only first-generation watch to support Android Pay. But it seems as though that's not the case.
A report from Ausdroid indicated that the original Huawei Watch, one of the bright spots in the first crop of wearables, secretly included an NFC chip inside, it's just disabled. And the company was exploring ways to enable the chip for Android Wear 2.0. According to a statement from Huawei provided to the Australian-based site, Android Pay functionality on the original watch was currently being testing by Google’s engineers.
However, a Huawei representative has thrown a giant bucket of cold water on that rumor. In a statement to Greenbot, the company said, quite succinctly, "The original Huawei Watch does not have NFC" (emphasis theirs). We've reached out to Google to be absolutely certain, but it certainly seems as though the rumors of Android Pay on the Huawei Watch are squashed.
After a bug that caused a slight delay, Google has been steadily rolling out Android Wear 2.0 to last-generation’s watch owners, with the most recent updates reaching the LG G Watch R and the original G Watch Urbane. Those two models join wearables by Fossil, Casio, TAG Heuer, and Polar watches as the first to receive the update. However, as one of the most popular first-generation models, the Huawei Watch has been one of the most anticipated updates.
Watch this space: Well, that stinks. The first batch of Android Wear 2.0 wearables that are enabled with NFC haven’t exactly suited our fancy, so we're still on the lookout for a watch that looks good and let us buy things from our wrist.
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