Google And Movado To Debut Android Wear 2.0 Smartwatch Collection At Baselworld 2017

The fashion industry loves a good fashion-forward wearable tech piece, and the latest high-tech-meets-high fashion smartwatch partnership will have people revising their wishlists.

Movado Group Inc. announced its partnership with Google Wednesday to create a new collection of smartwatches, supported by Android Wear 2.0, called Movado Connect.

Movado Connect smartwatches will include five styles of men’s watches that will debut this month at Baselworld 2017, the high-profile annual luxury timepiece and jewelry fair in Switzerland. The smartwatches will debut officially next fall and will retail for $495 in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and the Caribbean.

Rest assured, Movado will be putting the Google partnership to good use, and Movado Inc.-licensed brands Tommy Hilfiger and Hugo Boss also will be rolling out their own collections of smartwatches for fall 2017.

“We are thrilled to partner with Movado, a longtime leader and one of the most iconic brands in the watch industry,” Andrew Singleton, vice president of Android Engineering at Google, said in a statement. “With our combined expertise in watchmaking, design and software, we are able to create a beautiful yet functional timepiece that helps people live their everyday lives.”

The Movado Connect smartwatches will feature the company’s own “proprietary edge-to-edge crystal design” on the watch faces, according to Movado Group Chairman and CEO Efraim Grinberg. The collection — which is geared just as much to aesthetes as it is to the technologically inclined — features five customizable watch dials, which were inspired by Movado’s traditional Museum dial.

In true smartwatch fashion, the pieces will be Android and iOS compatible and will be able to support a range of apps, including Android Pay and improved fitness tracking capabilities.

Google launched its new-and-improved smartwatch software, Android Wear 2.0, last February. Timepiece brands like Nixon and Fossil developed smart watches that were compatible with Android Wear in the past.