HP announced a partnership with US-based fashion designer Michael Bastian earlier this year to develop a smartwatch. A single teaser picture and a very broad description of the watch’s functionality is pretty much all we had to go on at the time. The smartwatch now has a name – the MB Chronowing – and a battery life of about seven days according to The Wall Street Journal, who recently spent some time with the wearable.
The most noteworthy thing about the MB Chronowing—the unabashedly guy-size smartwatch by designer Michael Bastian and Hewlett-Packard—is what’s missing: The timepiece has no touch screen to swipe, no microphone to speak into. It can’t track your steps or measure your heart rate. It doesn’t even beep. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. “How many times have you been in a lunch and someone keeps checking their phone?” asked Mr. Bastian. His new watch is “intended to make you more polite,” he said, by allowing you to glance more discreetly at your wrist, hopefully less often than if you were wearing a techier smartwatch. It has the gentlest of vibrations to alert you to texts, emails and notifications from apps of your choice. It works with iPhone or Android so that “your phone isn’t dictating which watch you can wear,” and it has a clock dial on the face, because “that’s the thing you’re going to use 99% of the time,” he explained
