Skip to main content

Is that a pimple on your $15,000 watch? No, it’s a silly fitness tracker

Luxury Swiss watch maker IWC Schaffhausen has revealed a few details about its answer to the growing popularity of fitness trackers and smartwatches. It’s called IWC Connect, and it’s a fitness tracker that also works as a remote control for as-yet unnamed smart home devices. It’ll be built into the straps on its super swish Big Pilot watches in the near future. Cool, right? Well, no, not really. The trouble is, it looks like a big, ugly pimple on the side of what is a normally fine looking timepiece.

IWC Connect - Teaser

Exactly what the IWC Connect will do when it’s released isn’t very clear yet either. Apparently, it’ll provide “fully fledged activity tracking,” so expect steps, calories, and distance covered to be included, plus sleep tracking potentially added for good measure. The slightly unusual addition of smart home controls is even more hazy, and all we know for now is it’ll, “give wearers control over certain devices connected to the Internet of Things.” Not much to go on there, but at least it got a funky buzzword into its press release.

Recommended Videos

There’s no mention of Bluetooth or connection with a smartphone, so it looks like notifications won’t be part of the package. If the IWC Connect is intended to compete with the Apple Watch Edition, it’s not off to the best start.

An IWC Big Pilot watch, without the IWC Connect
An IWC Big Pilot watch, without the IWC Connect Image used with permission by copyright holder

IWC says it has worked with another company to produce the IWC Connect, and the idea was to create something that didn’t interfere with the mechanical watch’s aesthetics. What it has got looks a bit like a small Misfit Shine strapped to the strap, and it appears distractingly out of place. Withings managed to incorporate fitness tracking into a normal looking watch, so why couldn’t IWC?

It’s not the first luxury watch maker to try and add smart functionality without rebuilding or releasing a new model. Montblanc announced the slightly bizarre eStrap earlier this year, for example, and Kairos makes smart straps that fit many different watches.

The first IWC Connects will be available for IWC’s Big Pilot watches, which cost somewhere around the $15,000 mark, but can go for twice that if you want a limited edition. How much the Connect will cost isn’t known, but it’ll be sold as an optional extra for IWC Big Pilot watches. We’re promised more information will be revealed over the coming months.

Andy Boxall
Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…
The Oppo Watch charges its way to a day’s worth of battery life in 15 minutes
oppo watch news specs price availability release date gold black

Oppo has integrated the fast-charging tech its smartphones are famous for into its first smartwatch, the long-awaited Oppo Watch. VOOC Flash Charge gives the watch enough power to last for 16 hours after just 15 minutes spent plugged in, which means you get to take full advantage of its sleep tracking and special fitness routines whether you charged it overnight or not.

Short battery life is a major smartwatch pain point, and although the Oppo Watch’s 30-hour total usage time isn’t outstanding, it’s helped by the 15-minute charge window. The Oppo Watch is being pitched as a wearable with a focus on health and wellness, with sleep tracking on board. It also has an unusual five-minute workout feature, complete with voice coaching. We’ve yet to see this in action, but it sounds like a great addition to common smartwatch wellness features like breathing exercises and reminders to stand up.

Read more
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