Earlier this year, I tested two hybrid smartwatches and found that, overall, it’s a promising concept still in its teething stages. If you’re looking for basic notifications and smart tracking capabilities, or, more importantly, better-looking wrist wear, it’s great. Want third-party apps? Well, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
That’s the problem with a nascent market: You have very limited options. That’s not a dig at the existing players, but if hybrids are meant to rectify the decidedly unstylish look of a standard smartwatch, you’d hope for more variety. One of those watches was Frederique Constant’s “Horological Smartwatch” — which is a bit of a misnomer given that it’s powered by quartz. That’s certainly not going to win over any mechanical watch diehards. But a vintage dive watch or a tourbillon that could track your steps? That certainly would. Fortunately, with MMT’s new E-Strap, that’s 100 percent possible.
The smart strap solution — which makes it possible to turn any watch into a smartwatch since all the tech is confined to just the strap — has been kicking around for the last couple years. There are numerous Kickstarters out there, IWC seemingly toyed with the concept and Montblanc debuted their own connected strap, though you have to purchase an entire watch just to get it. Sinn even seemingly gave the concept a try by slapping an Apple Watch onto the strap of one of their mechanical watches — a solution so endearingly ill conceived I can’t help but crack a smile. But MMT’s E-Strap is perhaps the concept in its most tangible, realized form.
The secret is the buckle, which houses the battery and sensors. It’s about the size of a Starburst and completely hidden by leather when worn. The rest of the strap is standard, and there’s no way for anyone to know you’re wearing anything other than a regular watch. Yet despite its size, the strap is capable of working continuously for a whole week before it needs to be charged, a process about as simple as it gets: simply nestle the buckle into its charging dock and wait a few hours.
Unsurprisingly, due to its limited size and wrist placement, there isn’t much in the way of features. The E-Strap uses the same app as the Horological Smartwatch, but there are no notifications or alerts and no world time function. You also need to check the app to see your goal progress (the Smartwatch showed daily goal progress on an analog dial). What the strap can do is track your steps, calories, and your sleep. Some would call it watered down, but the features I found most useful in the original Horological Smartwatch were sleep- and fitness-tracking, anyway.
The E-Strap is easy to use. Setting it up is as simple as turning on your phone’s Bluetooth and pressing the discreet button on the side of the buckle. After that, syncing data is done automatically (many other Hybrids require pushing the watch’s crown in). The app is simple and intuitive, displaying sleep and step goal progress on the home page. Still, some might be disappointed with the strap’s lack of ability. It’s pretty widely accepted that heart rate monitoring is an essential component in fitness tracking, and some might consider the whole exercise redundant given that fitness-tracking and sleep-tracking apps are readily available on a smartphone.
