Smartwatches: Where Do You Stand?

Apple Watch, Withings, Samsung… some great brands rushed into the smartwatch space with varying degrees of success. However, a new trend is emerging, with models that appeal even to mechanical-watch enthusiasts, combining classic aesthetics with modern technology.

Fearing the “Kodak effect”—having famously missed the shift to digital—Swiss watch brands have seized the opportunity.

Rather than reading tea leaves and trying to imagine how consumers will behave in the years ahead, I’ll take this opportunity to share my own relationship with the smartwatch. I love the mechanical watch—its nobility, its philosophy. So it’s difficult for me to strap a smartwatch to my wrist and deprive myself of one of the only pieces of jewellery a man can wear.

So the smartwatch has to offer me something that goes beyond the symbolic power of a mechanical watch.

Aesthetically, there’s still a long way to go before today’s smartwatches can satisfy the mechanical-watch lover. Sure, brands like Withings or Frédérique Constant have adopted the design language of a traditional watch, but smartwatch screens that mimic the dials of other classic watches are of little interest.

In terms of battery life, the smartwatch obviously can’t compete.

But where the smartwatch really has something to say is in health and sport. If there are complications that mechanics simply can’t produce, it’s geolocation and the capture of bodily data.

For everything else, it’s just a remote smartphone screen: reading emails, being notified of incoming calls, checking your calendar, and so on.

When it comes to sport and health, the smartwatch really comes into its own. It can geolocate you and sometimes record your heart rate. This ability to record data, combined with an app, makes it possible to obtain interesting analyses of your health and sporting activity—and, in my view, that’s the most compelling part of the smartwatch.

Personally, I use smartwatches only for sport, because they give me far more than a mechanical watch—but I’m delighted to put my traditional watches back on once the data has been transferred to my smartphone.

So don’t hesitate to equip yourself with beautiful smartwatches if you share this way of using a smartwatch.