It has been long-speculated, and recently confirmed, that the first major smartwatch from the Swatch Group would be released by group brand Tissot. A few weeks ago, Swatch Group chairman, Nick Hayek, mentioned that a Tissot replica smart watch would be released at Baselworld 2016 and now here it is: the Tissot Smart-Touch. Based on the outgoing Tissot T-Touch Solar, the Smart-Touch is an extremely logical and modern evolution of the T-Touch family of technology-inspired Swiss timepieces that began life in the late 1990s.
This isn’t the time to go into a full discussion of the history of the T-Touch collection, but I can say that it makes a lot of sense for Tissot’s signature electronic watch to now offer “connected functionality.” What is the most interesting, is that Tissot cheap fake watches will sell the Smart-Touch at about the same price as the T-Touch Expert Solar, which was debuted in 2014. You can read the full , where I believe I mentioned that in today’s day and age the T-Touch collection seemed to almost “want” smartwatch functionality.
What the T-Touch Expert Solar added to the T-Touch family – in addition to an updated design and faster movement – was solar-power generation. As you can see, much of the face is made up of an exposed photovoltaic cell which uses ambient light to power the quartz movement, motors that operate the hands, as well as the LCD screen which makes up a large part of the bottom of the face. Tissot now joins a small rank of watches previously only made up of Japanese timepieces such as Casio and Citizen that combine light power generation with Bluetooth connectivity.
The Swatch Group has been mostly lukewarm in their response to smartwatches until now – a stance which makes sense since the “connected watch industry” has the potential to seriously disrupt their core revenue stream which comes from the sale of Swatch and other entry-level priced timepieces. With that said, the Swatch Group also owns a number of historical luxury Tissot replica watches brands who primarily sell mechanical watches such as Omega, Blancpain, and Breguet. In fact, the Tissot Smart-Touch is the first major smart watch technology investment that the brand has seemingly made (for a final consumer product) since the ill-fated SPOT watch system from the early 2000s which connected to radio signals.