If you don’t know what BaselWorld is, don’t worry! Wikipedia has you covered (it’s a trade show for the international watch and jewellery industry that takes place around this time every year in Basel, Switzerland). As the smartwatch industry heats up, it’s becoming a hotbed of news about future products coming to the market, especially as traditional watchmakers start jumping into the smartwatch market.
Wareable reports that Tag Heuer’s CEO gave some more information about their up-and-coming Android Wear watch at this year’s BaselWorld, including a name — or at least, an allusion to one. He’s referred to it as Carrera Wearable 01. The “Carrera” name points to the heritage of Tag Heuer’s racing-inspired watch, with 50 years of heritage to its name (and pictured above). With a number in the name, they seem committed to producing more than just one watch!
The Carrera Wearable 01 was revealed in April to be developed in collaboration with Intel and Google, and is looking to be priced into the stratosphere at US$1400. For that price though, you might find a couple of interesting differences between Tag Heuer’s offering and those already on the market, although the company’s not giving the game away yet.
For starters, Tag Heuer wants this wearable to last. One of the major criticisms of smartwatches to-date has been their somewhat disposable nature. If a new model of the watch is going to come along every year, why buy an expensive one? According to Wareable, Tag Heuer’s solution to this is to make the watch upgradeable, although the specifics on just how this is accomplished or exactly which parts of the watch can be upgraded remain a mystery. They want the watch to rank alongside the kind of gift you’d give someone for a major life event (the example given was a graduation gift), so they might be talking about replacing the guts of the watch with a newer more powerful core every year or two … or they might be talking about new watch faces.
On the stamina front, Tag Heuer’s promising a 40-hour battery life on the watch. While it falls a little short of two days, that’s still enough to get you through the following day should you forget to charge the watch overnight. This could be due to a super low-power chip coming from Intel, and it’ll be interesting to see if Intel can make inroads in a space that’s dominated by Qualcomm’s low-power Snapdragon 400 (Motorola’s 360 is powered by a TI chip).
That’s about all we know right now – actual specifications like screen size, storage and the actual selected processor should become known as the release of the watch gets ever closer. The Carrera Wearable 01 will go on sale in the US for US$1400 in late 2015.
Will you trade up to the high end Carrera Wearable 01? Tell us in the coments!
Haha people had listened to me :D. I told that an expensive swatch will only sell if it can be be upgradeable :p
Ive got a big number birthday in the next few years, I could defiantly see me investing in a high quality “watch shell” if the promise was that I could replace the innards every few years for a few hundred dollars. Problem is promises are often not kept.