Breitling B55 Smartwatch Coming for Christmas
The Apple Watch will have a formidable competitor for holiday shopping dollars this season as the Breitling B55 Connected smartwatch will be hitting stores by the end of November. In an interview with Mashable, Breitling CEO Jean-Paul Girardin dished the details of the company’s first foray into the field of wearable devices.
“Before the end of this year,” Girardin said of the release date. “Before Christmas, I would say. We don’t have the exact timing for now but probably before the end of November; certainly before the end of the year.”
Girardin admitted that it isn’t easy to decide exactly which features to include on the fist Breitling smartwatch. “There are so many options, so many new features that you can add. The truly difficult part is – which ones do you keep? You want to create something that’s smart but also still easy to use.
“We had to get rid of a lot of functions because we had no room and wanted to keep the watch low energy, but really it was about boiling it down to the most necessary functions to keep it a Breitling product. That was the interesting challenge.”
Girardin indicated that Brietling resisted the temptation to make the B55 Connected Smartwatch the most feature-filled, app-heavy device on the market. “For us, the perfect product is not the one with the biggest number of functions. It’s the product where you have nothing to remove. Some have the tendency to add and add but that’s not a Breitling. We want to offer the consumer the most competitive watch – like in mechanical watches – one offering useful functions but not too many to use.”
Heading up a luxury watch company rather than a tech firm has made Girardin more conscious of the potential short life span of a connected device. “We think long term. The product cycle of luxury goods is much longer than most usual wearables. It means that all the components we have will be able to receive software updates, which you’ll be able to do online. We foresee added features and new functions in the future. The next B55 Connected will be not the first and only. There will be evolution, for sure.”
