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LG's Watch Urbane makes comeback on AT&T as G5 preorders open

After some mysterious hardware problems, the second-edition LTE smartwatch is back and being touted as a boon companion to LG's G5 smartphone

Katie Collins Senior European Correspondent
Katie a UK-based news reporter and features writer. Officially, she is CNET's European correspondent, covering tech policy and Big Tech in the EU and UK. Unofficially, she serves as CNET's Taylor Swift correspondent. You can also find her writing about tech for good, ethics and human rights, the climate crisis, robots, travel and digital culture. She was once described a "living synth" by London's Evening Standard for having a microchip injected into her hand.
Katie Collins
2 min read
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The Urbane has had its problems, but LG has now supposedly smoothed them out.

Sarah Tew

LG's Urbane LTE second edition smartwatch is back, riding on the coattails of the company's new flagship smartphone.

AT&T customers can soon get their hands on a package of high-end LG goodies, with the operator making the G5 smartphone and Urbane Second Edition smartwatch available for preorder from Monday.

Both the smartwatch, touted as first Android Wear watch with LTE connectivity, and the modular Android smartphone will be available to buy in store from April 1.

Perhaps the second time around will be luckier for the Urbane. The first time it went on sale, unspecified hardware problems caused LG to pull it from shelves. The South Korean company stopped taking orders for the watch last November, a little more than a week after the Android wearable became available. Now the Urbane is back, but unlike with other smartwatches, you'll have to pay more than just the upfront cost if you want to take full advantage of it.

Due to the watch's cellular connectivity, which requires its own SIM card, you'll need to add it to your data plan. The benefit is that it can operate independently of your phone.

The Urbane's separate SIM card also means you can use AT&T's NumberSync feature. NumberSync lets you attach your mobile number to another device -- in this case your watch -- for the purposes of sending and receiving calls and texts.

To get your hands on an Urbane from AT&T you'll need to shell out an extra $100 on top of the price of your G5, and pay $10 extra per month to add it to your existing data plan. Or, if you want to buy it separately, you can pay $18 dollars per month on a 20-month plan, bringing the final cost of the watch to $360.

The G5, meanwhile, will start from $22.97 per month for "well-qualified customers" on the AT&T Next 24 plan. Alternatively, you can buy one G5 and get one free when you buy it with on a Next plan.