Swiss luxury watch makers respond to the Apple Watch

Luxury watch companies, Alpina and Frederique Constant, are going to turn their traditional watches into mechanical Fitbits

The coming of the Apple Watch has certainly caused some stir in the Swiss market. The onset of the smartwatch series even as a whole hadn’t been as much of a threat as Apple’s smartwatch which is said to combine luxury, style as well as practicality.

Consequently, the Swiss manufacturers have responded in a rather interesting fashion; the two smaller luxury watch companies, Alpina and Frederique Constant have changed the course of the design of their upcoming analogue watches. They are turning their analogue timepieces into mechanical Fitbits with the addition of some electronic components.

This new platform that we are referring to is the Manufacture Modules Technologies or MMT which is housed inside the Swiss-made cases and runs the hour and minute hands along with the subdial which is going to track the user’s activities. The side of the watch features a crown which acts as the pusher since everything can be controlled directly from the watch instead of rotating the crown around.

The battery is something worth mentioning here; according to the claims of the manufacturers, the battery has the capacity to last for two years and is going to sync with Bluetooth. The modules which we mentioned earlier are made by MotionX which also made the motion trackers in Jawbone’s products. The watch is also embedded with an app which can show your health data while you move through your daily routine. The central face shows the accurate time and the subface displays other data.

The system is quite similar to an activity tracker which works like the Withings Activité. The companies need to stick to the traditional luxury watch designs and also incorporate this technology hence the functionality has been kept as simple as possible.

These watches obviously aren’t for the mainstream like the Apple Watch, though it is also falling towards the luxury bend. These watches have nothing similar to the smartwatches we have come to know in the past few months. As Ariel Adams at ABlogToWatch notes, “The question MMT is trying to answer is how the traditional watch industry will react to timepieces no longer being about only tradition, luxury, and style, but also (once again), functionality.”

source: motionX