Skip to main content

How not to make wearables: The hideous Cybertool is a cautionary tale

MWC 2025
Read our complete coverage of Mobile World Congress

Just when you thought wearable tech was finally becoming attractive and useful, Acer and Victorinox came along with the Cybertool, a watch that shatters that illusion so completely, it’s like we’ve made no advancements whatsoever in the past few years. Bafflingly unattractive, the Cybertool is evidence even watch makers haven’t got the hang of this smartwatch thing.

It’s not actually a wearable in itself: The Cbertool is an accessory to Victorinox’s range of damn-fine-looking Inox products — hard-wearing Swiss watches that are apparently the brand’s best-selling timepieces. Surely then, they deserve an equally damn-fine-looking smart accessory? Victorinox spent four years and went through hundreds of prototypes before signing off on the Cybertool. It’s … very sensible, but not the product we would have expected after so much diligence.

It’s not the fact the Cybertool doesn’t do much that shocks, it’s how ugly it is.

The Cybertool is a clip-on piece of plastic that that adds a massive bezel to your lovely Inox watch, leaving the face exposed, while adding in a selection of basic smart features after connecting to your phone via Bluetooth. The usual notifications are displayed on an small LED screen, along with a step counter, stopwatch, and a timer. There’s a vibration alert, and the Cybertool even shows the time on its digital display, just in case you need to double check.

The case is water- and dust-resistant, and it has a battery that needs charging each week, despite the relative lack of actual smart features or a big color touchscreen. There are buttons to press, which scroll through the options on the screen, and an accompanying app. Victorinox said people didn’t always need smart features or connectivity, hence the reason for making it removable.

It’s not the fact the Cybertool doesn’t do much that shocks, it’s how ugly it is. It’s a gigantic wart that Victorinox expects people to put on their pleasingly attractive watches, and we’d question whether anyone at all will want to do so. Certainly anyone who wants to wear a shirt will think twice, because the Cybertool stands so proud of your wrist, it’ll be impossible to get past the cuff.

When Acer said it had been working on a new product with Victorinox, it was exciting news. The result was kept a complete secret from everyone, right up until the big reveal — and it’s not difficult to see why. To say it was a letdown is an understatement.

So who’s to blame for this affront to wrists everywhere? Acer told Digital Trends the Cybertool was, “designed by the research and development center at Acer,” and that it, “offers the best of both worlds.” Victorinox has yet to respond to our questions on design and the response to the Cybertool by its customers.

Yes, wearables are hard to get right, but it shouldn’t be this easy to get them so wrong. The Cybertool is a $100 accessory that turns something stylish into something repulsive, and is the absolute last thing we expected from a company with such an established pedigree in strong design. Fossil and TAG Heuer have nailed it, but Victorinox’s Cybertool proves that just because a few watch makers seem to be cracking the wearable conundrum, not everyone’s getting it right.

Andy Boxall
Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
How does Garmin measure stress, and is it really accurate?
Garmin Vivomove Sport dial close up. Credits: Garmin official.

Garmin watches are known for their robust activity tracking, but that's not all these fitness watches can do. Over the years, the company has been adding wellness features to its lineup of watches. These new health-focused metrics allow people to analyze their fitness and identify outside factors affecting their performance. One such factor is stress, which is something Garmin watches actively measures.
But you may be wondering—exactly how does Garmin measure stress? In this article, we break down how Garmin measures stress and delve into the accuracy of this metric. Should you trust your stress score? Read on to find out.

Is Garmin's stress score accurate?

Read more