Tested Time IQ+ Move

Traditional ticker with tasty tracking talents

£150 / stuff.tv/timexiqmove

On the surface the Timex IQ+ Move looks just like your average analogue watch, but it also offers step tracking, alarms and basic timer alerts. Sure, it doesn’t do much, but that’s kind of the whole point of this £150 watch.

This wearable has the same tastefully minimalist style as other, normal Timex watches. Its casing is stainless steel, with slightly curved mineral glass on top. It’s a smart look, and it’s water-resistant down to 50 metres.

Timex makes the IQ+ Move with either a leather or a silicone strap. Our leather one has a sort of corrugated finish across half of its length. Not a fan? You can always swap it out, as the IQ+ Move uses a standard strap fixture.

Beneath that plain exterior, the IQ+ Move has some hidden smarts… but they don’t go far beyond basic step and distance counting. If you’re after phone notifications, apps or GPS tracking, that’s not the idea here.

When you boot up the Timex app, you get to choose which daily goal the little extra dial will guide you towards: distance or steps. The second hand can take on the same task if you don’t demand ultra-precise timekeeping.

This lo-fi approach gets you battery life of up to a year, which may be just what you want if daily smartwatch charging has made you want to go and live Twitter-free in the middle of some woods.

Count on it The Timex Connect app is as basic as they come, with readouts of your steps, distance travelled, calories walked off and how much you slept last night. You can dig into these to get an hour-by-hour graph view. Sync without trace To sync with your phone you have to press down on the watch’s crown for five seconds, a gesture so long that it feels like you might be factory-resetting the watch. Syncing is fairly slow and a bit unreliable.