Following on the heels of Fossil and Tag Heuer, Swiss watchmaker Movado has announced its most advanced smartwatch to date. The Movado Bold Motion is based on the Bold line of watches and marks a large leap forward in what the company’s connected devices are capable of. Although Movado has released a few, more expensive, wearables, they were based on the Active X platform. The Active X platform allows watchmakers to easily add fitness tracking abilities to traditional looking watches but it is also very limited in capabilities. For the new Bold Motion, Movado has decided to partner with HP to provide additional functionality. [Of note, this is not HP’s first foray into smartwatches; last year the company partnered on the Michael Bastian Chronowing.] Movado’s new device maintains fitness tracking abilities but now adds notifications and haptic feedback. While the new smartwatch does not feature a screen, it has 13 single-color LED lights including a ring near 12 o’clock on the face and lights located at the hour marks. The Bold Motion is 44mm in diameter and is slightly thicker than the traditional Bold line. It is estimated to have a 7 day battery life and is available in black with either white or teal LEDs for $795. It is compatible with both iOS and Android devices.
With the Movado Bold Motion, it finally feels like the company is starting to take smartwatch seriously. It is great to see Movado move beyond Active X and offer a deeper, more connected experience. We wish the company would have gone a step further though and included multicolor LEDs to allow the user to better understand what type of notification was being received. This would have kept the same sparse design, but allowed a higher level of notification customization. With the current design, Movado seems to only allow notifications to be adjusted at a very broad level; there is only the ability to customize which apps communicate with the watch and most everything outside of phone calls, emails, and texts seems to be relegated to “Other.” Head past the break for a Movado’s video about the Bold Motion.
