Fashion brand Guess reckons the future of smartwatches could be "a Bluetooth headset for your wrist", with the company set to launch its own range of timepieces in Europe later this year.
Guess first showed off its smartwatches at CES in January and has since slimmed down the design and confirmed how much it will cost.
Prices for the Guess Connect will start at $349 (£227) when it launches worldwide before the end of the year. The actual UK price is yet to be announced.
The company has licensed technology from smartwatch firm Martian and built it into its own watches that work with Android and iOS. Guess Connect links up to Siri on an iPhone or Google's voice control service for Android and has a built-in microphone and speaker for hands-free calls and controls.
A Guess spokesperson said the watch was designed to look almost identical to a normal timepiece, with the only major difference being a small monochrome screen that displays notifications such as text messages.
The Guess Connect is made of stainless steel with a resin back to avoid blocking the Bluetooth antenna it uses to connect to a smartphone. Straps will be available in silicon rubber and leather. On the side of the watch are three small buttons -- one controls music playback, another acts as a shutter for taking photos with the smartphone camera and another turns the watch off.
A spokesperson for the company said the watch was designed for people who wanted a fashionable timepiece rather than a piece of technology. As a result, the Guess Connect has an analogue watch face and the smart features are less advanced than those on devices from the likes of Samsung or LG.
The watch uses Bluetooth Low Energy for most of its communications but switches to standard Bluetooth for voice control. Battery should last between three and five days, with charging done via a micro USB port. A secondary battery powers the analogue watch for up to two years.
The Guess Connect can also vibrate when it receives notifications, with the companion app allowing users to set different vibration patterns for different types of notification.
This could, for example, be two short pulses and one long pulse for a Twitter notification and two long pulses and one short pulse for a Facebook message.
Guess is one of the many traditional watch manufacturers experimenting with technology. A number of Swiss firms are expected to show off their new smart timepieces at Baselworld, a watch and jewellery event in Basel, Switzerland later this month.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
