New smart watches are ready to wear

SMART watches combining brains with beauty stole the show at the global mobile phone congress.

GUESS Watches proudly announces the launch of their new wearable tech timepiece, GUESS CONNECT Image supplied by GUESS

BRACE yourself: some of the most beautiful smartphones and smart watches made are about to head our way.

And it’s not a case of style before substance. These beauties combine great looks with advanced digital-age functionality.

Mobile World Congress, the global gathering of the telecommunications industry in Barcelona each year, has produced stunning new devices.

Samsung and HTC upped their game by releasing phones that combined looks with advanced software capabilities, but the stars of the show were the timepieces.

Heads turned when Chinese manufacturer Huawei displayed a traditional fashion wristwatch with tech-savvy features, getting in ahead of the long-awaited Apple Watch, the first glimpse of which comes at a pre-launch event in California on Tuesday.

But neither Huawei or Apple has the field to themselves. A dark horse has emerged in the form of watchmakers such as Guess that, along with notable Swiss makers, are adding smart watch functions to traditionally crafted devices.

Several start-up watchmakers also are seeking to trump the big players.

The result is stunningly beautiful round-faced wristwatches that keep track of your steps, display texts, let you take phone calls, let you control music and even act as your phone camera button.

Manufacturers are convinced consumers want fashion smart watches that resemble the round-faced wristwatches of old. Big square clunkers are out. Apple’s promotion of its watch as a fashion statement underlines this, ­although, interestingly, its watch is indeed square.

This week Huawei hit a sweet spot with a beautiful round-faced watch with a sapphire glass ­display. The watch has a 1.4-inch AMOLED 400x400 pixel display with an attractive 286 pixels per inch resolution.

Not only can users answer calls, but the watch has a six-axis motion sensor and a barometer sensor, and it measures steps, calories and sleep. It has some of the features of specialist fitness watches — you can create a single activity record for each walk, run or cycling event, and it has a heart rate monitor.

The key to its success will be battery life and price, and these are yet to be revealed.

Traditional watchmakers have seized the opportunity to make intelligent watches. Fashion watchmaker Guess Watches has a product that delivers phone notifications and offers voice-to-text messaging, camera control, music control, with Bluetooth connectivity and three to five days’ battery life. It is compatible with the iPhone and Android phones.

Swiss-designed ZeWatch by MyKronoz offers similar ­func­tionality, as do stylish watches by Cognito that are water resistant.

Hong Kong-headquartered Connectedevice made a splash with a waterproof smartwatch that local telco Optus is adapting to contactless payments. Before year’s end, Optus users will be able to wave their smart watch at a pay terminal, just as they can with some credit and debit cards.

Others are coming aboard. ­Alpina and Frederique Constant, Swiss watchmakers since the 1800s, are producing smart watches, as is Mondaine.

However, it’s unlikely these watches will put a big dent in Apple and Android general market share unless they are affordable. But they will represent luxury appeal, a space where fashion and tech savviness combine in the 21st century.

Despite being hotly tipped to do so, Samsung did not release a smart watch at the congress. It, along with HTC, led the way with smartphones that emphasised design. No longer will Samsung encase its phones in cheap plastic; its Galaxy S6 smartphone and Galaxy S6 Edge featured stylish curved glass edges. The S6 is made from ultra-strong Gorilla Glass 4, with elegant metal sides, in what is an iPhone-like construction. But the beauty transformation prompted Samsung to ditch traditional features. There’s no longer a removable battery, and the S6 and S6 Edge do not support microSD cards, so users cannot supplement phone storage. ­Waterproofing also has gone.

Both S6 phones are incredibly powerful phones with eight-core processors and with fantastic 5.2-inch Quad HD super AMOLED displays. Resolution is a stunning 576 pixels per inch.

Samsung says the S6 battery is the fastest charging device on the market, with 10 minutes needed to charge the phone for four hours’ use. It says charging from zero to 100 per cent takes about half the time of the iPhone 6.

The S6 models will lead Samsung’s charge into the world of mobile payments, with the manufacturer announcing payment rollouts in the US and South Korea initially. There’s no date in Australia yet for Samsung Pay.

HTC’s new One M9 is also a design leader. Like previous flagships, the One M9 has a brushed aluminium seamless unibody; however, some versions of the M9 have a dual-tone finish: silver and rose gold, or gold and pink.

The M9 is aimed at younger users who enjoy media consumption. It has a high-resolution 20 megapixel snapper on the rear, together with a large-pixel front-facing camera that HTC says captures 300 per cent more light than its predecessor. Taking bright and clear late-night selfies is one of its leading features.

The M9 has speakers at each end of the phone that can simulate Dolby 5.1 surround sound. Like the S6, the M9 has an eight-core processor, making it one of the most powerful phones on the market. It has 32 gigabytes of storage and a slot for a microSD card for an ­additional 128GB of storage. There it is one up on Samsung.

Microsoft has taken a different approach. Recently it has been pumping affordable mid-range phones with high-end features and premium software. They’re half the price of competing premium handsets. At Barcelona Microsoft announced another such smartphone, the Lumia 640, an attractive 5-inch model with a polycarbonate backplate, and a larger 640XL model, with a 5.7-inch display.

Microsoft is punting on its upcoming Windows 10 attracting users not only back to desktop systems but also to its phones and the Surface Pro tablet. It has been encouraging developers to create what it calls “universal applications” that will run across all Microsoft device platforms. It’s hoping that users will fall in love with having a uniform Windows experience no matter which ­device they pick up.

Time will tell whether they do or don’t. Whatever the case, this is the year that more consumers will demand beauty and brains from their tech.

Chris Griffith attended Mobile World Congress in Barcelona courtesy of HTC.