Louis Vuitton smartwatch runs on Android Wear 2.0 software and was developed in collaboration with Qualcomm and Google. It is the newest addition to the Tambour watch family, the signature timepiece the brand debuted 15 years ago. It follows Tag Heuer’s Connected watch, the Apple Watch Hermès and Michael Kors’s Access line in an effort to combat the fact that when it comes to wearable technology design and style is undermined.
The price starts at $2450, with the black version ringing in at $2,900. The operating system will receive the usual updates and could theoretically last five years or more, like any smartphone. Tambour Horizon’s practical life span could average about two years. Most fashion smartwatches with similar parameters sell in the $200 to $350 range.
The 42mm case sports a 1.2-inch AMOLED 390×390 touchscreen and is powered by a Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor. It also has 521MB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage, alongside a 300mAh battery. However, it doesn’t have an optical heart rate monitor, which makes sense given that people often don’t work out while wearing $2500 watches.
The Louis Vuitton smartwatch does what most smartwatches do — it alerts you to your email and texts, counts your steps, has lots of apps — though it is not meant to replace the phone. It works with both Apple and Android devices and has a battery life of about a day.
Like the Apple watch, it charges when you click on to a magnetic pad, connects to your phone via Bluetooth and also works with Wi-Fi. It comes in three finishes (polished steel, brushed steel and full black), and it has 30 different straps for men and 30 for women, which snap on and off with a satisfying ease.
Louis Vuitton smartwatch is aimed at offering a level of exclusivity to a usually mass-market device. Louis Vuitton is all about status, and the Horizon is bringing modern-day watch technology to a sliver of the demographic that needs to sport a status symbol while still connecting to the internet from their wrist.
