Summit watch unveiled

Montblanc has became the first brand in the Richemont family of luxury companies to put out a smartwatch.

The Montblanc Summit, based on Google’s Android Wear 2 platform, aims to compete with, among others, the Apple Watch and rival Swiss brand TAG Heuer’s Connected Watch (which was released last year and received a major update in the form of a modular version this month).

Like the TAG, which is also on the Android platform, the Montblanc watch is targeted to fans of the brand.

By designing the case to look like a classic mechanical watch from its 1858 line, it hopes to attract a mix of loyalists and also millennials who aren’t necessarily accustomed to wearing anything on their wrists but who might try out a unique-looking smartwatch.

The differences between the TAG and Montblanc versions are not vast – they both offer an array of Android apps.

While the TAG has GPS for sports apps and NFC for making mobile payments, the Montblanc watch has a heart-rate monitor embedded in the back of the case.

They both come loaded with watch faces that look like their iconic models, which these companies swear is important, but to some this might appear to slightly misses the point.

Fans love mechanical watches for their ingenuity, beauty and internal structural achievement-a dimly-lit 2D simulacrum on a screen, cased in something that looks like a mechanical watch, is hardly the same thing

At 46mm across, the watch is large. The idea is that the large face, made with curved glass, allows for users to play in various apps and text or email with ease.

Future versions of the Summit may link with Montblanc’s Augmented Paper (paper notebooks that record your writing into the cloud) in a work/ play ecosystem that suits fans of the brand perfectly.

At roughly US$960 (NZ$1360) for the Montblanc and US$1500 for the TAG, they way overshoot the US$369 Apple Watch 2.

But they are teaching the Swiss brands what their users want from a smartwatch – if anything.

‘‘I think it’s still not entirely clear to a lot of players in the traditional watch space why their fans would want a smartwatch version of their watches,’’ says Jack Forster, an industry expert and the editor-in-chief of the watch enthusiast website Hodinkee.

‘‘Which isn’t very surprising, because I don’t think the tech world in general has figured that out either.

‘‘Manufacturers feed new designs into the marketplace, and consumers say to themselves, ‘Well, I didn’t know it, but I really do want one,’ and as various products are accepted or rejected, manufacturers refine their approach.’’ – Bloomberg