This gorgeous Swiss watch tracks steps and sleep, and promises two generous years of battery life.
Fanny packs. Dad jeans. Bright yellow mock turtlenecks purchased at the Gap circa 1991, and still worn defiantly, inexplicably, today. If you wear any of these items, feel free to accessorize your outfit with a touchscreen smartwatch. You’re already style-compromised, and the smartwatch can’t do any more damage.
But if your fashion tastes are a bit more—oh, I don’t know… discerning—then consider the new “horological smartwatch” from Frederique Constant. It’s a legitimate Swiss-made watch with a built-in accelerometer for step- and sleep-tracking. Like the other watches based on MMT’s smartwatch platform, it marries sophisticated aesthetics with the same MotionX algorithms you’ll find in a number of big-name activity-tracking wristbands. And battery life is rated for a full two years.
That’s 729 more days of battery life than today’s typical touchscreen smartwatch. That’s a really big deal.
The MMT watches don’t provide smartphone notifications like smartwatches from Apple, Pebble and all of Google’s Android Wear partners. And that’s also a really big deal. But the $995 Frederique Constant model I’ve been testing for the past week is packed with retro-mechanical intrigue. It doesn’t look like a toy, gadget or sci-fi movie prop. And its look aligns with my fashion sense, which errs toward heritage brands likeGustin and Billy Reid, not Daft Punk’s House of Cyborg Apparel.
Or the Gap of the early 90s.
The best smartwatches from the big consumer electronics companies have their place. But there’s just no replacement for the delicate moving hands, polished raised indices, and convex sapphire crystal of a traditional Swiss wristwatch.
Read the entire article at PCWorld.com