Here's a dilemma: You're a big fan of the look, feel, and design of super-expensive mechanical watches, but you're also a bit intrigued by all the potential of the new smartwatch era. You previously plunked down thousands for a super-fancy watch, however, which makes you a bit less interested in buying yet another wrist adornment that will cut into the amount of time you can show off your main piece.
Montblanc, maker of expensive fancy mechanical watches, hopes to have found an issue for your dilemma. The company has announced a brand-new "e-Strap band" that keeps your watch's face all mechanical, pristine, and sexy, while packing all the electronic fun bits into the watch's actual strap. Would one call this a hybrid watch, in that case?
Suffice, the leather strap—with a "carbon fiber texture," as A Blog to Watch describes—comes with a little electronic module at the bottom that you can get in either coated steel or gray steel. Yes, you can customize the band itself a bit.
The little module has a small 128x36-pixel OLED screen on it, which you can use to view notifications whenever you flip your wrist around. The module also pairs with a related smartphone app which gives you more access to said notifications as well as a built-in activity tracker. The e-Strap band tracks your footsteps via a built-in accelerometer, but that's it; don't expect any fancy pulse rate measurement or other health-themed items from Montblanc's band.
Said e-Strap will come packaged with a few of Montblanc's Timewalker Urban Speed watches, but you can also purchase it separately. It'll be compatible with any other 42mm- or 45mm-wide Timewalker watch and, as A Blog to Watch notes, it'll probably work with any other watch with a similar lug-to-lug size. It is, after all, just a band—a smarter band, but a band nevertheless. It's also a band that retails for 250 Euros or so, which is more than the cost of most simple smartwatches it's designed to imitate.
