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Saturday, 1 February 2020

The Frederique Constant Horological Smartwatch

A Sunday afternoon in Manila saw a trip out from Ortigas to the Mall of Asia in the Manila Bay area. Wandering around the mall, we came across a dedicated Frederique Constant retail store so I marched straight in to enquire about their Horological Smartwatch.


I wanted a hand's on experience on how this smartwatch fared against the TAG Heuer Connected smartwatch. I like TAG Heuer as a brand and have made a number of enquiries regarding their Connected smartwatch so I wanted a look at what Frederique Constant had on offer.

The first thing you notice is the style, the Frederique Constant is an elegant timepiece and a genuine quartz watch complete with a standard watch face. I must admit I prefer mechanical timepieces but in this instances the quartz movement makes sense.

The TAG Heuer Connected smartwatch is larger with a superimposed watch face screen on a digital display - not to my taste. My taste is the more elegant but less functional Horological Smartwatch over the Connected smartwatch.

As a comparison, the Frederique Constant is connected via bluetooth to a smartphone but I was having difficulty downloading the app so I wasn't able to fully appreciate the functions of the smartwatch.

So I went online to find what I could actually upload from the smartwatch and found it is pretty limited. This is an early version and I believe the idea is sound, this is a watch connected to a smartphone and not just a pure smartwatch.

Functions such as sleep patterns, heart-rate and step-o-meter are fairly limited for a smartwatch. So as much as I like the standard quartz watch design, the integrated printed circuit unfortunately has limited functionality.

I think I'm not going to recommend the Frederique Constant smartwatch to any of my friends as the style of the watch is good but the functionality is lacking compared to a genuine smart watch.

What we may find out is future models may well indeed include enhanced options so I hope Frederique Constant sticks with this concept and builds on the existing architecture. This platform has plenty of upside - the concept is good.

I would rather recommend a cheaper mechanical watch and a dedicated smartwatch for connectivity. I would tend to think this is the probable future of the quartz/smartwatch and as functionally improves will become more popular. 

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