At Baselworld in Switzerland, the world’s largest luxury watch fair, TAG Heuer, Intel, and Google announced that they are working together on a “Swiss smartwatch.” While this is clearly a move to take on Apple in the luxury smartwatch space, the TAG-Intel-Google watch won’t look or feel like a smartwatch: “People will have the impression that they are wearing a normal watch,” TAG Heuer’s CEO told Reuters in an interview at Baselworld.
The announcement from the three companies was very light on details—they haven’t even shown us a rendering of what the watch might look like—but there have been enough leaks, and meaty quotes from the TAG Heuer CEO, that we can make a fairly solid prediction of the watch’s appearance and functionality.
According to the leaks and quotes, TAG Heuer will release a “digital replica” of the Carrera, a fairly bulky sports watch. It will reportedly look and feel just like a normal, mechanical Carrera, but internally there’ll be Intel hardware and Android Wear software that provide some smartwatch functionality. What isn’t clear is the extent of the computerization: Will there still be a mechanical movement inside, or will it be all-digital with an LCD clock face?
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