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TAG Heuer did it. Hublot did it once before, with the Big Bang Referee smart watch. And now, they’re doing it again. They’re making an Android Wear WearOS smartwatch. The question has to be, what makes a Hublot smart watch worth above 5 grand?
For Hublot, the answer is, ‘well, we’re Hublot’. But don’t let that dissaude you from a Hublot smartwatch when the Fossil equivalent running the same OS is $295. This is a perfect time to talk about what makes an expensive watch more expensive.
There are some practical differences. The Hublot has a titanium or ceramic case. Titanium retails for $5,200, and black ceramic will cost you $5,800.
Both include a 42mm OLED high-definition touchscreen covered with sapphire crystal along with a Snapdragon Wear 3100 processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, and a 300mAh battery.
Just on materials alone, you’re not getting sapphire, titanium, or ceramic in your Fossil smartwatch.
In terms of Hublot-ness, you get some excellent Hublot-exclusive watch faces. If looking like a traditional Hublot isn’t for you, the Big Bang e has its has some additional abilities.
Because the smartwatch is a computer, Hublot has added some features. They have a watch face that keeps track of the lunar calendar. If you’re more a fan of the colorful side of Hublot (remember the demin Hublot of a few years ago? Tiger stripes dials?), they have a face that changes color throughout the day as part of the #HuboltLovesArt initiative.
What do they mean, ‘change color throughout the day’? Every three hours, the watch face will change color, displaying art by Marc Ferrero. The art changes with animation every hour.
- 9am-12pm is Orange Dynamite
- 12pm-3pm is Lucky Green
- 3pm-6pm is Magic Red
- 6pm-9pm is Magic Blue
- 9pm-12am is All White
- 12am-3am is Black Magic
- 3am-6am is Rainbow Spirit
Just for a second, I’d like to gripe about the Snapdragon processor. This isn’t Hublot’s doing, as much as it is Qualcomm’s. Qualcomm makes the Snapdragon Wear processor that everyone uses in WearOS watches.
The Snapdragon Wear 3100 is a bump of the Snapdragon Wear 2100. It’s the same platform. That 2100 from 2016 was based on the Snapdragon 400 processor designed for mobile phones made?in 2013. The chip process for it is a staggeringly large 28nm.
Qualcomm has some Wear processors in the works that will be on the 12nm process, but until then? The processor is stuck 4 to 7 years in the past. Wearing a smartwatch means eventually being out of date and obsolete, but you want that to happen in the future, not the day you buy it.
The Hublot Big Bang e looks sharp. I like the idea of titanium or ceramic. The faces are tastefully made, and you get all the benefits from WearOS that you might hope for- some activity tracking, notifications, music, and GPS. The Titanium retails for $5,200, and Black Ceramic will cost you $5,800. Pre-orders aren’t open, but you can sign up to be notified at Hublot.com.
