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Intro and Tag Heuer
As that meteorite hurtled towards the earth, the dinosaurs partied on, oblivious.
"Look at us, we're massive! Mammals will never catch on, they're ugly and hairy. We've been here for millions of years and… Ooh, hasn't it gone dark suddenly?" (Bang.)
Baselworld in Switzerland is the world's number one watch show. Its inhabitants are the dinosaurs, the Apple Watch is the meteorite and smartwatches (and wrist-worn wearables in general) are the mammals. Its a torturous analogy, and an exaggerated one, but my English teacher always said to start with a grabby sentence.
Anyway, we just spent two days living it up at Baselworld - and boy do those old, rich, Swiss guys know how to party - and we learned some things. Here is the main one.
1. Almost nobody who makes the high-end watches that dominate the show gives a hoot about smartwatches.
In terms of organisation, opulence and the rich, strong smell of money, Baselworld - and in particular its three-storey main hall - is head and shoulders above any tech event. All the 50 or so big brands' "stands" are multi-tiered, exquisitely-designed pavilions humming with suited staff, elegant receptionists and helpers, and visited by a steady stream of journalists, buyers and advertisers.
What they all had in common, from Rolex to G-Shock, is that none of them can quite see a compelling use or a way to make money out of smartwatches. They don't think customers really want it. They actually, visibly wince when contemplating the horror of having to charge up a watch daily. Then they say, "We're sponsoring some more yachts this year. Have you met our brand ambassador Felix Baumgartner? He sky-dived from space. Would you like some more Champagne and cheese?"
Fact is, in the entire main hall, there was nothing you could really describe as a smartwatch. Although there were some quite interesting semi-smarties that we'll come to later.
2. One man who makes high-end watches DOES give a hoot about smartwatches.
That slightly stopped figure in a stylishly rumpled suit (stylishly rumpled for about 1987, anyway) is Jean-Claude Biver. He's on Tag Heuer's board and has worked at the top level in the watch biz for many years, for Omega, Hublot and Blancpain.
Biver has an air of eccentricity about him, but he is not a dinosaur. He's plunged Tag Heuer into competition with Apple, Samsung, LG and the rest, and he's going in fully armed. There's no pissing about with fitness-track dabbling or message alerts via lights and sounds here. Tag is making an Android Wear watch, in collaboration with Android (obviously) and Intel.
Biver's since dropped hints that it'll retail for around $1,000 and be round.
I must admit, I initially assumed it'd follow the brand's squared off, Monaco form factor (as worn by Steve McQueen) but the reference point is, supposedly, the Carrera – according to Hodinkee.com, Biver bellowed, ""For $1,000 would you rather wear the Apple Watch, or a watch that looks like this Carrera?" – and that's round.
Tag Heuer is noted for its forward-looking approach. It sponsors Formula E, which many of the Formula 1 fans who Tag sell to see as a kind of heresy. Now it's making a smartwatch, which many of its punters probably see in much the same way. But really, it's a continuation not a left turn.
Now, another thing about the Carrera is that it's a skeleton watch – you can see its inner workings. That would be impossible with a touchscreen; it'll just be another Android Wear, electronic watch but in a fancier case. Right? No sir: wrong!
Kairos and Vector
This is where you start to see how old Baselworld and thrusting, new smartwatches might be able to co-exist. We've briefly covered Kairos before, with its T-Band "smart strap". They're still developing that – if you compare the render on that link with the picture above, you may detect a few minor differences.
However, at Swiss Creative Labs, a sort of "Baselworld Fringe" that runs in the Ramada hotel next to the main conference centre, Kairos was showing off something potentially significant, at least for the likes of Tag Heuer: a range of watches that sit a translucent touchscreen over a classic Swiss or Japanese automatic movement.
This one is the SSW158. It runs a proprietary OS, but you can easily see how the basic touchscreen tech could be applied to Android Wear or Pebble OS. The touch response is a little hit-and-miss at present (these don't roll out till July so there's times for tightening), but it works.
Kairos is offering a range of solutions with its own watches, from purely mechanical to a more limited screen variant that's more translucent and just has an eight-character scrolling display for notifications, to any combination of the above with a T-Band, which itself comes in at least three variants.
More importantly, it's keen to license its tech to other brands.
However, to give you an idea of how seriously Baselworld currently takes these kinds of innovations, let's compare the main hall and Swiss Creative Labs, shall we? This is the main hall, and the kind of thing you find lying around in it.
And this is what the Creative Labs area is like.
4. Battery life is still seen as a key battleground, and Vector wants to win there
Vector gave a pretty hilarious press conference in what appeared to be either a church hall or a very rich goth's bedroom. As you can see from the above, spelling ain't their strong suit. They're also a pretty funny group, led by the faintly vampiric figure of CEO Joe Santana, formerly of Timex, stoic and bulldog-like CTO Andrei Pitis who does the coding and Nike Fuelband design guy Steve Jarvis.
However, Vector's line of products is potentially really strong. They're keenly priced ($200-$350), use battery-saving Memory LCD screens, and don't try to do too much. Mainly Vector's watches are about basic fitness tracking, notifications, and telling the time, for a long time: the potentially killer feature here is 30-day battery life.
To this end, they connect via Bluetooth, you can push new faces to them, notifications arrive with a small vibrating pulse, then can be viewed by turning your wrist to view the screen. Turn your wrist back and the notification is gone, and the watch face is back.
Visibility in high and low light seems good, and all the basics are sound. What Vector is doing is pitching tech to a fashionable crowd, rather than trying to get techies to wear a watch.
There are also a lot of options for potential customers here. Where a lot of smartwatch debate has raged around whether a round or square face is better, Vector very cleverly side-steps this by, er, making both.
This is part of Vector's Luna line.
And this is part of its Meridian line.
I could probably quibble about some of the aesthetic choice here, and some of Vector's marketing claims about "contextual learning" seem a little, er, ambitious, but overall it's a pretty cool product. And who knows? There's an open API, so developers may help take it from "pretty cool" to "very cool" in short order.
Some possible scenarios: there's support for IFTTT and Nest, so you could have scenarios like your heating coming on because the Vector's sleep tracking tells it you've awoken. When you leave the house, your security system knows because of your phone's GPS, and alerts you via the Vector that your alarm's now armed.
That's all for the future, though. For now, Vector is a decent smartwatch that's discreet and has some low-key but clever features, such as showing appointments around the outer edge of the watch face. One to watch.
Mondaine and Tissot
5. MMT has made fitness trackers beautiful
The fact of the wearable matter is that right now, there's only one game in town, and it's fitness tracking. To date, the best looking of these has been the Withings Activité but this now has serious competition, and with two-year battery life, at that.
The MMT ("Manufacture Modules Technologies") platform developed by Union Horlogere Holdings (which owns the Alpina and Frederique Constant watch brands), and Fullpower Technologies can be slotted into any watch, once the requisite license fee has been coughed up, and that's what Mondaine (of "Swiss Railway Clock watch" fame) has done with the Helvetica 1 Smart.
This is just a great-looking, clean, contemporary watch that also tracks your steps via its lower dial, as well as doing sleep tracking, for what that's worth. It then serves up its findings via an app.
The only button is the one below: press it and it activates Bluetooth for a period just long enough to sync with the app, which in return makes syncs the time from your phone, so it's always bang-on correct, including when you've just flown into a new time zone. Result: minimal battery drain, maximum accuracy.
Maybe there's no tech here that's earth-shattering but MMT is a great way to put something extra into traditional watches without compromising their aesthetics or battery life, and Mondaine has made the most of it. More classically styled watches with the same module are forthcoming from Alpina and Frederique Constant, if that's more your bag.
6. Tissot is also getting on board
Tissot is a more affordable brand, and one that's been synonymous with innovation for years. Its T-Touch line uses touch sensitive casings to show anything from different time zones to altitude on its analogue dials. No wonder, then, that it's looking into making a smartwatch.
Here, you'd think the motivation must surely be fear. A smartwatch can, in theory, pull off all a Tissot's clever tricks, and more besides. The Tissot is more attractive and has a longer battery life but they'd be crazy to not be concerned by the rise of the smartwatch.
So they're making a connected version of the T-Touch Expert Solar touch panel watch. They had no actual watch to show (the picture above is the non-smart Expert Solar), but supposedly this is no knee-jerk rush job. In fact, their man told me they've been working on this for three years, "waiting for the market to be ready."
Well, the market's ready now, but their smartwatch is not. A release "this year" is promised.
Tissot was, at least, able to tell me a number of its "planned" features, though swiftly caveated with "nothing is confirmed yet". So please bear that in mind.
This one won't use Android Wear or any other established platform, but it is will have built-in GPS, phone connectivity via "a range of apps" for iOS and Android and give notifications via "lights, sound or vibration".
There'll be accessories too – trackers for your keys, and connected home things – "a weather station" was specifically mentioned. Wooh!
Here's where we see another recurring theme of Baselworld. Tissot's guy said this: "We think Apple making a watch is a good thing. It will make people who have never considered getting a watch interested, so the overall watch sector will be bigger." He wasn't nervous about it at all, no no no.
Best of the rest
7. But really, nobody at Baselworld gives a hoot about smartwatches
In terms of big names "going smart", there really isn't a lot to tell, which is in itself telling. The fact is that at the middle of the trad watch market, something like the Casio G Shock range is as "smart" as it gets.
Of the two seen here – Casio were showing off a stack of new variants at Baselworld – the GPW-1000TBS on the left features GPS, but that's just to find your time zone and retain 100% accuracy when it can't sync with the more standard Radio Wave time signals.
The MTG-S1000V-1A on the right is a great-looking thing, but here the "smart" features are limited to the G Shock standards of resistance to electric shock, gravity, cold, vibration, water and shock.
Ask anyone from Casio if they'd consider adding alerts or apps and they just shrug. Both of these cost around £1,000 and are the latest in a long and illustrious line.
Casio may be one of the Japanese brands that caused the last great schism in the watch market, with quartz movements, but it's seemingly no more bothered by smartwatches than its Swiss counterparts. It was showing off time, alarm and zone adjustment via app on its Edifice line but it was doing that last year, and nobody much cared then.
"We want to give customers smart features that are useful," Casio's guy told me. Clearly for these long established horology vendors, that means an easier way to adjust watch features that have been around since time immemorial. Breitling has taken the same approach with its B55, albeit for about 10 times the price.
8. Guess is the current "state of the art" in smart/style crossover watches
So in terms of household name watch brands, the "smartest" product on show at Baselworld was probably the Guess Connect. This was at CES, and is a standard Guess piece, with Martian's Bluetooth notifications system added – that's the tiny LCD panel at the bottom.
With this, you can control Siri or Android by speaking at your wrist, and hear their dulcet responses through an onboard speaker. The customisable alerts also have customisable vibration patterns by type.
So, tech functionality that's solid, in standard Guess watch casings that may or may not be to your taste. This is the current state of the art in smartwatches made by non-tech companies that you can actually buy. Woop!
9. But next year will be different
I don't think we'll see Samsung or Apple joining Baselworld's throng of beautiful, multi-level horology palaces next year. But with Tag, Tissot and Mondaine (by way of MMT) are tentatively taking baby steps this year, I think we'll see a LOT more smartwatch attempts and announcements next year.
Jean-Claude Biver of Tag Heuer gets it. He does't look down his nose at tech brands; he sees billion-dollar fortunes to be made. He sees allegiances between old-money Euro firms and sneaker-wearing American "geniuses" (he used that word a lot).
Tag Heuer's watch won't be out till October/November 2015. Tissot's effort should appear around the same time. The new breed of Swiss fitness trackers from Mondaine, Frederique Constant and Alpina will start stepping out during summer and autumn 2015, as should Kairos and Vector's stylish smartwatches.
However, Apple's Watch will be out in April. If it does as well as some analysts are predicting, that will early provide the push for Baselworld's denizens to take smartwatches seriously. They don't really understand or care about the tech or the culture, but they sure do understand money.
10. And finally, a visual metaphor for the meeting of Swiss watch making and tech
Jean-Claude Biver, while literally pounding the table: "When Silicon Valley meets Switzerland… You will see what will happen!" (left to right, Guy Sémon, managing director Tag Heuer, Jean-Claude Biver, Mike Bell, general manager, Intel New Devices Group, David Singleton, Android Wear director of engineering, Google)
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