If you’re not familiar with Swiss MMT, they’re the folks behind the smartwatch technology in the connected watches from Alpina and Frederique Constant. But being tucked into a watch case is simply not all they want to do – instead, they want to be on your watch strap.
The Apple Watch Series 2 is the second generation connected wearable smartwatch device from the Cupertino, California, tech giant. When the original Apple Watch came out in 2014, an oft-asked question was “what would Steve Jobs think of it?”
While there seems to be some doubts as to the overall viability (and longevity) of the smart watch segment, that is not stopping brands from rolling out new watches. While the fully-electronic watches (such as the latest Android Wear models recently announced) get most of the attention, there is another type of watch, the so-called “hybrid” smartwatch. We saw this with the Frederique Constant Horological Smart Watch, and it offers a long-life quartz movement (no charging!) along with a bluetooth radio to allow some notifications and the like on your wrist. The most recent announcement for this type of watch brought the Armani Exchange Connected to light.
With the just announced Frederique Constant Analytics device, a small, easy to use, and relatively affordable watch accuracy measuring device, the promise is that checking your watch’s accuracy has gotten a whole lot easier and more convenient.
For those of us who have not studied the art of watchmaking and repair, knowing what is going on inside the movements of our mechanical watches can be daunting. That is, until a tidy tool came along in the form of the Lepsi Watch Analyzer that attaches to a watch, measures important indicators of its health and performance, and tracks it handily on your smartphone.
The smartwatches out there run the gamut from full LCD touch-screens that almost want to replace your phone, to those watches that look like, well, normal watches, but include some additional brains inside the case that can talk with your phone. That latter scenario is what we have with the just-announced Michael Kors Access “hybrid smartwatches.”
The smartwatch has been a thing for quite a few years now, long enough for many to take for granted the remarkable engineering that has gone into the creation of these sci-fi-inspired devices. The A-Team of disassembling and repairing smart-everything, the guys at iFixit have taken apart the Apple Watch Series 2, and it sure is worth it to take the opportunity and have a closer look at how it’s constructed.
Functionality between smart watches and fitness trackers increasingly overlaps these days. If you have a watch with the various sensors to pick up your step counts and Bluetooth to send the data to a phone, it is not that far of a leap to blow things out to a full smart watch suite. With the advent of the Android Wear ecosystem, that has definitely become a lot easier to accomplish. The latest entry for that would be the Polar M600.