At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Acer pulled the covers off its wearable project in conjunction with Victorinox Swiss Army watches. The Inox Cybertool, as it's being known, is an additional piece which clips around the watch face of existing Victorinox watches and adds some digital smarts. All while leaving the traditional watch face peeking through.
But, there's a catch. It's absolutely enormous.
OK, so it's very clearly a first-gen product, but the size is impossible to ignore. The Cybertool is essentially a shell that encompasses the entire watch with a Gorilla Glass covered display showing various smart functionality. The LCD doesn't need to be on all the time and you're never away from being able to see what the actual time is.
There's a mixture of soft and hard plastic making it up and there are a small selection of buttons on the outside that control the various features. There's some very basic activity tracking involved by way of a step counter and calorie tracker, but in conjunction with the companion app you also get notifications of phone calls, reminders, and can even send out a distress call. There's also a basic timer and stopwatch feature, something you naturally don't normally get on an Inox watch.
It's pretty rough and tough and is IPX7 rated, and it's actually going to protect your watch in circumstances when things might get a little heavy going since it covers virtually all of it. And you should be good for around a week of battery life between charges.
The approach here is one of adding features to your existing tools. Instead of coming out and just designing a smartwatch, Victorinox paired with Acer to design a product that can work in conjunction with it's range of analog time pieces. The big drawback here is going to be the size, but equally you're not going to wear it all the time. That's the point of it.
No pricing or availability for the Cybertool were available intially.
