While Apple might want you to shell out as much as $17,000 for its Apple Watch Edition, Tag Heuer is entering the luxury smartphone market with a watch that costs $1,500, but has a whole lot of neat features.
Tech companies like Apple and Samsung have been quick to enter the smartwatch market, but the new Tag Heuer smartwatch marks the first time a major high-end watchmaker has made the move from cogs to processors.
First shown to the public last March at the Baselworld Conference, the Tag Heuer Connected Watch, as it’s called, certainly looks more like the watches we’ve come to know for the last few decades rather than looking like the current crop of smartwatches.
Setting you back $1,500, the watch is actually a joint project between Tag Heuer and its tech partners in Intel and Google, with the latter providing the operating system with a customised version of Android Wear.
Unlike the Apple Watch, however, the Connected Watch will work with both Android (Jelly Bean and above) as well as iOS 8.2 or later, according to Bloomberg.
The Tag Heuer Connected Watch on display. Image via Tag Heuer
As for what it can do, well, it has what you’d expect from a device firmly living in the world of the internet of things (IoT), with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, gyroscopic sensors for fitness apps and 4GB of storage.
It does lack a few features, though, most noticeably no GPS, heart-rate sensor or speaker, which means that it will be reliant in many ways to its parent smartphone, but will manage to rack up 30 hours of power with normal use.
What you’re really paying top dollar for, of course, is the brand name with all the assumed prestige that comes with it, with plans in place for a number of celebrities to launch watch faces in the months to come.
But the most interest-piquing feature is Tag Heuer’s promise that if someone doesn’t like being a part of the wearables future they can trade it in for a ‘traditional’ watch after two years for $1,500.
The US and Canada will be the first countries to get the Connected Watch today, with the international rollout expected later this month.
