Luxury Brand Montblanc Debuts Their Own Smart Wearable With The E-Strap

Friday, January 2, 2015

Luxury Brand Montblanc Debuts Their Own Smart Wearable With The E-Strap

Montblanc-Timewalker-urban-speed-e-strap-watch-2

Some of today’s smartwatches like the Moto 360 from Motorola and the LG G Watch R from LG, even the newly unveiled Alcatel OneTouch Watch are doing all they can to appear as the perfect balance of looking like an actual timepiece while providing the user with useful, smart features like music controls, health and fitness tracking capabilities and access to notifications at a glance. Traditional timepiece manufacturers aren’t just going to sit back and watch tech companies take a giant piece of their market though, especially without offering their own product to meet the needs of those who still wish to wear a watch but want some more advanced features.

Montblanc is one of these companies, and they have just entered into the smartwatch/wearables market with their latest product called the e-strap band. The e-strap band is not a new watch itself, but rather a strap which can be attached to a handful of the regular watches that MontBlanc sells, with a tiny device built into the strap. The e-strap band device has a small LCD screen on it which can show the user things like notifications and track steps, however it doesn’t have the capability to place calls, get directions or even control your music playback. It’s certainly a more simplistic approach to the smart wearables and smartwatches market, but with the capability to get a couple simple, key features, it just might be what some people are looking for since they can still wear a regular luxury timepiece. Since the e-strap band sits on the strap, the LCD screen isn’t facing upward which makes notifications a little more discreet, a feature we actually find pretty appealing.

You can reportedly buy the e-strap band alone, or it can be purchased as an add-on piece to a watch like the 2015 Timewalker Urban Speed watches. The notifications will feed you info about missed or received calls, social feed info, messages and emails, calendar entries and reminders. For the step tracking, the e-strap has the included pedometer and accelerometer. The e-strap connects to a companion app for Android devices as well as iOS, which is what helps to transmit the data to the band. While the watches themselves will come at a hefty price, the e-strap will be about 250 euros by itself.