Swatch Is Building A Smartwatch

Swiss watchmaker Swatch is diversifying into wearable computing, with a device called Swatch Touch expected in time for next summer.

CEO Nick Hayek told Reuters that this smartwatch will remain primarily a timekeeping accessory, and not just a notification screen for the phone.

There’s no information on which operating system it is going to use, but Hayek said the company has plenty of potential partners to choose from: “All the big technology firms want to work with us and I don’t rule out that we are or could be collaborating in some areas.”

New tradition

The Bluetooth-enabled device will be able to keep the time, as well as do things like counting steps and calories burned during the day.

Hayek said he doesn’t see smartwatches as a threat to his business. But the world of wristwatches had been transformed by technology once before: Swatch itself was born out of the period known as ‘Quartz Crisis’, when traditional Swiss watchmaking industry was decimated by the advent of cheap quartz watches in the 1970s and 1980s.

Thanks to this new technology, mass manufacturing of battery-powered timepieces eventually moved to Asia. Since 1983, Swatch has been working to reverse this trend, and infuse traditional Swiss ideals into a quartz watch.

The Swatch Group already manufactures electrical components, chips, displays and batteries for a range of third parties. But Hayek said that the upcoming smartwatch will be first and foremost a watch, and all of the digital functions will be considered an extra. “Technology alone doesn’t sell, not in watches,” he added.

Meanwhile, the competition in the lucrative wearables market is heating up. In June, Google revealed the first three smartwatches running a specialised version of Android OS called Android Wear. These included LG’s G Watch, Samsung’s Gear Live and the circular Moto360, which will be officially launched on 4^th September.

Android Wear re-imagines Android as a lightweight OS based on ‘cards’ that enables wearable devices to do things like estimate journey times, display notifications, answer or reject calls, or check in for a flight.

Apple is widely expected to unveil its own play in this space – the iWatch – during a press event on the 9^th of September, where it could also launch a 12-inch iPad and a bigger iPhone.

Samsung has just launched its Gear S – a smartwatch with a curved screen and 3G, based on open source Tizen OS.

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