Almost exactly two years ago today in 2014, Apple shocked the watch and consumer electronics worlds when they announced the Apple Watch. Not calling it a smartwatch, but rather just the Apple “Watch,” now two years later in 2016 we read more…
Today in Berlin, prior to the electronics trade show IFA, Samsung releases their newest smartwatch and the seventh such device in their collection with the Samsung Gear S3 – and this time around, I’m actually helping Samsung to launch it by being part of their Unpacked event.
Here’s the dilemma: you love watches, mechanical watches, with a classical or vintage look. On the other hand, you also love connected items and the concept of a smart watch is something you dug into, especially since the introduction of the Apple Watch. However, you don’t like it. You think it’s not going to fulfill your needs of mechanical / vintage / luxury timepieces (and you’d be right). You don’t want to wear two watches either and the solution found by Sinn is… weird. Well, Maintool, a young French startup, might have a solution for you, with a discreet connected strap that can be used on any kind of watch. Here’s Classi.
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.
German Sinn is nothing if not practically minded. Best-known for their hearty, down-to-earth tool watches, fans of the brand may not have seen this coming. If it’s not immediately clear from the pictures and title, the Sinn Dual Strap System is a pair of strap halves for your Sinn watch and a pair of strap halves for an Apple Watch, which together make a whole wrist experience.
Surprise, surprise, we here at Monochrome are not into smart watches, connected watches or any of those wrist-buzzers and step counters. The number of times we cover smart watches are brought back to the bare minimum. That’s for various reasons, but most importantly A) it doesn’t do anything (for us) in terms of emotion, and …