If you found Montblanc's newest luxury
smartwatch a little rich for your blood, at a starting price of close to US$ 1,200, wait until you hear how much TAG Heuer is charging for its refreshed
collection of Connected timepieces.
This was the first-ever luxury brand to
release a smartwatch powered by Google's software platform back when said OS
still went by the Android Wear name, and although a later version of that
device with a modular design of sorts started at an almost reasonable (by TAG
Heuer standards) US$ 1,200 a couple of years ago, the premium new
"collection" of Wear OS products merely includes super-expensive
and crazy expensive models.
We're talking US$ 1,800 variants with black
rubber straps and stainless steel cases, a US$ 1,950 model pairing a robust steel
bracelet with a 45mm case made from the same material, and a US$ 2,350 TAG Heuer
Connected flavor replacing the steel case with one constructed out of
"ultra-light" titanium. That may sound like a ridiculous pricing structure
for most everyday smartwatch users, but of course, this Swiss company has a
radically different target audience than, say, Apple or Samsung.
Instead of selling millions of copies to
the masses with razor-thin profit margins, TAG Heuer is perfectly content moving
a much lower number of these bad boys at a massive gain per unit. Believe it or
not, the upgraded TAG Heuer Connected is not even LTE-enabled, like the
significantly cheaper Montblanc Summit 2+, although for what it's worth, its
list of features does include a built-in heart rate monitor, unlike its 2015
and 2018 forerunners.
The latest addition to the ever-expanding
family of fashion-centric Wear OS devices also shares many other specs and
capabilities in common with plenty of budget-friendly smartwatches out there,
from standalone GPS support to a large and sharp OLED display with a diagonal
of 1.39 inches and resolution of 454 x 454 pixels, a fittingly hefty 440mAh
battery capable of keeping the lights on for up to 20 hours between charges,
NFC for wrist payments, Snapdragon Wear 3100 processing power, and water
resistance up to 300m deep.
