Update: Timex has now confirmed the existence of their connected watch – official details have been updated below.
Blink and you'd have missed it, but America's top watch brand, Timex, yesterday announced is was getting back into connected wearables, with a Withings Activité-style analogue fitness watch.
At the Qualcomm 3G/LTE Summit in Hong Kong, Timex CTO Thomas Essery announced the Metropolitan+.
The timepiece features a dial between 3 o'clock and 6 o'clock that shows your inexorable progress towards your daily steps goal (10,000 paces or GTFO!).
In the top-left, between 10 o'clock and 11 o'clock, there's a second dial that appears to be a mode selector, with settings of steps and distance – so the bottom-right dial could be set to show your progress to either goal – plus a Bluetooth indicator and 'off' if, for some reason, you'd like to pay extra for a connected fitness watch and then use it as normal watch.
There's also a great big red-arrowed hand that could be a stopwatch or something else.
The big dial with the three hands on it? That's for telling the time.
The Metropolitan+ follows the same path as the efforts from Withings, Mondaine and Runtastic; it'll use a standard watch battery which will last for about six to nine months.
Mondaine and Runtastic have taken a long time getting their Activité rivals to market – neither is actually quite available to buy yet – and we've experienced some connectivity and reliability issues with some, though not all, Activités we've used to date. Clearly making an analogue watch function as a fitness tracker is not as easy as it looks, so let's hope Timex knows what it's doing…
The Metropolitan+ will be a part of the company's new 'Connected Style Collection'. Initially, it'll come in three variants: a silver case with black dial and red accents, black case/black dial/orange accents, and black case/black dial/orange accents.
There are three strap materials available, black leather, black silicon and orange nylon.
The silver variant will come in at US$150 (around £100, AU$200), and the other two will be US$125 (around £80 , AU$175). It will be compatible with both iOS and Android.
A Timex spokesperson tells us 'next year' for launch, though the Powerpoint slide this was on seemed to imply 2015.
