EARLY VERDICT
If you needed an expensive watch, the Montblanc Summit 2 is a classy luxe fashion statement with leading specs. Everyone else can get the same functionality in a device a quarter of the price.
FOR
- Handsome, handsome watch
- Newest Snapdragon 3100 chipset and Wear OS 2.0
- Selection of respectably classy digital faces
AGAINST
- Same functionality as smartwatches that cost a third as much
- Lackluster tutorial
Heavy!
Luxury watch brand Montblanc entered the smartwatch market with the Montblanc Summit a year and a half ago, a hefty and expensive digital timepiece that didn’t do much more than its competitors despite retailing at three times the price.
Now the company has released a follow-up, the Montblanc Summit 2, which iterates just a bit on every facet and commensurately raises the price over its predecessor, too.
Whether that justifies its exorbitant price tag ($995, £845 or around AU$1,380) misses the point: this is a luxe item for consumers who want their fancy accessories to just keep up with the times. Everyone else would probably want a lot more functionality for a smartwatch that costs as much as a decent laptop.
And the Summit 2 actually does have something over most other smartwatches: it’s one of the first to get the Snapdragon Wear 3100 chip, the latest and greatest for non-Apple watches. How much that speeds up Montblanc’s watch operations isn’t clear yet, but transitions are smooth enough and I’ve yet to overwhelm its interface.
Montblanc has beefed up the other specs in the watch accordingly: it’s one of the first to sport the Snapdragon Wear 3100 chip and packs 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage.
The Montblanc Summit 2 is also one of the first watches to come with Wear OS 2.0 out of the box, and it imported the operating system with few changes. In fact, Montblanc barely added any of its own apps, though there are a couple of cool surprises.
A nice feel for a pricey watch
The Summit 2 watch case we handled was made of an attractive stainless steel, though some (even pricier) models come in titanium. It spans 42mm, which is fairly wide for a smartwatch – in other words, it might not be comfortable for thinner wrists.
But the corollary is true: it’s a robust watch with IP68 water and dust resistance, and water resistance to 50m/5 ATM.
The 1.2-inch 390 x 390 (327ppi) AMOLED screen is sharp and bright, and made from what Montblanc describes as “a unique sapphire crystal glass.” Among all the watch’s features, the glass looks like the expensive timepiece the Summit 2 aspires to be. But it does seem to retain fingerprints.
And like every good luxury watch, our review unit for the Summit 2 came with a calfskin leather band, which looks great on the wrist. But it isn’t heavy enough to counterbalance the hefty watch body, and we definitely felt the weight drag down our wrist after a few hours. (Don’t worry, there are a total of 11 bands to choose from, though they all cost a pretty penny.)
If the price to enter high-class accessories is a complex band mechanism, count us out: the leather band in our review unit had a clasp requiring a maddening amount of fussing to figure out and adjust. We’d much rather have a mundane holes-and-latch system than this befuddling setup; fortunately, those are available on Montblanc’s page for the Summit 2.
What comes with luxury
Montblanc clearly wanted to impart its newest smartwatch with the touch of luxury, and it did – though maybe not as much as its high price tag would suggest.
Simply put, the Summit 2’s body is thick, and looks a bit like a silver puck on your wrist instead of a sleek, meticulously-designed statement piece.
The body is dense enough, yet it wouldn’t rise so high off your wrist if not for the heartbeat sensor on the bottom, which has become de rigueur for most smartwatches. The LG Watch W7 luxe-looking watch did without, though its own traditional clock mechanism took up just as much space. Luxury smartwatches require their own compromises.
To get closer to the traditional luxury watch look, the Summit 2 has a selection of digital watch faces, some modern and others approximating older analog timepieces. Thanks to a sharp and vibrant screen, some of these facsimiles look pretty convincing, and bystanders may not realize it’s a smartwatch if they aren’t looking closely.
Like the original Summit, the Montblanc Summit 2 has a steel case with an oversized crown on the watch’s right side that bears the brand’s six-pointed symbol. Once you get over the dial’s comical prominence (it looks like a giant machine gear on an otherwise sleek device), it handles well, letting you sift through options with a good balance of sensitivity and resistance.
In other words, the crown feels luxe. Not so with the buttons flanking it, which have such a shallow depression you’ll wonder if you pressed them at all.
It took some trial-and error to figure out just what those buttons do since the watch’s tutorial didn’t mention them; ditto with the user guide included in the box. They’re app shortcuts, which you can customize if you dive deep into the watch’s settings.
Software and apps
The Summit 2 is among the first wave of smartwatches to pack the powerful new Snapdragon Wear 3100 chip. Not coincidentally, all three watchmakers – Louis Vuitton, Montblanc and Fossil — produce mostly higher-end timepieces.
Even with its new chip, we haven’t seen the Summit 2 to be noticeably faster or more fluid than other smartwatches. Given that this is the beginning of the Snapdragon Wear 3100’s lifespan, it’s not too surprising that Montblanc didn’t innovate ways to harness its true potential yet.
There’s probably another reason we aren’t seeing more gains from this processor: the Summit 2 is running a pretty stock version of Wear OS. If you’ve seen it on other watches, you won’t be surprised by anything here.
As we mentioned before, don’t expect a lot of unique Montblanc apps: most are limited to baseline functional tools like a stopwatch, timer and flashlight.
There are some gems in the rough, though, with novel picks like a stylish world clock and a travel guide. (The latter sounds gimmicky, but it’s actually a deep app with facts and pointers on food, culture and tipping that looks handy for quick reference).
As for battery life, Montblanc claims a full day of battery from the 340mAh unit, which we found about accurate. Mind you, that isn’t terribly impressive, but the watch also has a timekeeping-only mode that kills all the fancy smartwatch features to eke out another day or two of battery life.
Fortunately, the Summit 2 recharges rather quickly in its cradle, gaining most of its battery life back in less than an hour.
Early verdict
The Montblanc Summit 2 is another attempt to make a luxury smartwatch worthy of its parent brand. And the Summit 2 is certainly a statement piece with quality materials that stand above other devices.
Whether it’s superior to the competition is up for debate. Aside from a few neat new apps, it doesn’t have anything to offer software-wise that you can’t find in another, cheaper Wear OS 2.0-supporting smartwatch.
The exterior, then, is the big differentiator, and it certainly looks like an expensive watch with a burnished steel case, quality digital watch faces (they matter!) and real leather band. But you wouldn’t believe the Summit 2 cost nearly $1000…not until you saw the Montblanc label, anyway.
All told, it’s a too-heavy smartwatch without much in the way of clever design, but if you shell out for it, people will certainly notice. Just a warning: they might seriously lowball the list price if you ask how much they think it costs.
Source: techradar.com
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