Sony has been rather experimental with its wearable tech since it stopped building smartwatches for Google’s Wear OS. Following the e-paper curiosity that was the FES Watch, and in place of the Sony SmartWatch 4 that never materialised, its latest devices are a pair of smart straps designed to be worn with traditional, mechanical watches: the wena wrist pro and the wena wrist active.
Sony’s smart straps are available to pre-order in the UK from February 13, but you may have encountered them before, either in Japan, where the wena line has been sold since a crowdfunding campaign in 2015, or on the internet where that crowdfunding and then subsequent iterations garnered some attention.
Here’s the good news. If you’re interested in a connected strap to smarten up your existing watch, the 20mm steel wena wrist pro is probably the slimmest, most discreet option out there. It's water resistant to 50m while 18mm, 20mm and 22mm lug attachments are included to fit a range of existing classic and fashion watches. The teeny, slightly retro display is built into a buckle that, unlike the first-gen wena and previous attempts at this tech from established watchmakers, is no bulkier than a regular one. It also feels comfortable on the wrist. That itself is promising.
The screen can be used to keep on top of phone alerts - maximum two lines of text - and basic activity tracking. More usefully, the smart module also handles contactless payments, in partnership with Mastercard, NXP and Wirecard’s boon. On this point, Sony stresses that you won’t have to awkwardly manoeuvre your wrist to tap to pay, unlike smartwatches where the NFC chip is in the main watch body on top of your wrist. But then again, how hard is it to flick your wrist over?
Sony has partnered with Seiko in Japan, and here in the UK Sony’s offering a range of watch modules, priced £100 to £400, that can be bundled with the wena straps. These include quartz watches in three hands or chronograph, a model with a solar movement (both three hands or chronograph, again) and a premium mechanical model with a Miyota 905S movement and sapphire glass.
Read more: The best smartwatches for Android and iPhone
Onto the bad news. Firstly, the wena wrist pro strap costs £399, which, bafflingly, is the same price as an Apple Watch Series 4 (and way more than a £279 Series 3). The bundles with the watch modules cost from £499 to £849 though Matt Oakley, who handles Sony Europe’s new business development, says that he expects that the majority of sales will be strap only.
The wena wrist active strap, a 20mm silicone smart band, is slightly cheaper at £349 and it does offer built-in GPS, heart-rate tracking plus integration with both Apple Health and Google Fit. But there’s nothing particularly compelling to rival what Fitbit and Garmin are doing, beyond the ability to quick release and change up watch and fitness modules and the contactless payments.
George Jijiashvili, senior analyst at Ovum, sees bulky designs and limited functionality as the main reasons that smart traditional watch straps have remained a niche to date. “I believe the saving grace for smart watch straps could be payments,” he says.
It’s clearly the biggest push here. At Sony’s London launch event for the wena wrist line, Caroline Casey, Mastercard’s vice president of innovation, partnerships and labs for Europe, said: “We're seeing interesting things around wearables. We're seeing growth at a very, very, very rapid rate - especially compared to other forms of payment.”
However, although Sony’s launch issuer for the UK and Ireland will be Wirecard’s boon app for iOS and Android that allows users to set up virtual cards and automatic top-ups with any bank, its app description details a £1.49 per month charge after the first three months. That's right, you may be charged to use contactless payments through the strap.
Indeed, Sony is also slightly late to the smart straps game, at least outside Japan. The Swiss watchmakers themselves have been gravitating towards this group of features, including payments, for some time now. Frederique Constant quietly launched its own screenless, step and sleep tracking E-Strap back in early 2017.
Montblanc’s second smart strap, the TWIN, will launch in June 2019 and adds payments to the standard notifications and activity tracking featureset on 2015’s e-Strap. Montblanc’s CEO Nicolas Baretzki says the TWIN will also be integrated into a folding buckle for the first time. “With the ubiquity of mobile payments in countries like the UK,” he says, “we see that paying with a tap of your wrist is indeed a very promising use case for the TWIN.”
The two to watch, says Jijiashvili, are Barclaycard’s bPay and Swatch. In 2018, bPay, which works with any Visa or Mastercard, partnered with watch brands Guess, Mondaine, Timex and startup hybrid watchmaker Kronaby (whose parent company recently filed for bankruptcy) to build NFC payment chips into straps that are indistinguishable from their dumb counterparts. “Last month Swatch brought its contactless payments service to Europe, Switzerland in particular, which followed its launch in China couple of years ago,” he says. “I believe Swatch will look to expand its Swatch Pay! payments platform across Europe."
Most smart-strap casualties, Pebble among them, have been crowdfunding projects or relatively small-scale startups. The CT-Band, which aimed to squeeze a heart-rate monitor and various other fitness features into a slim watch band, has yet to be released. There’s no reason Sony can’t be a player in connected wristwear if it catches up quickly by appealing to the customers of watchmakers who haven’t shown any interest in additional tech-enabled features.
Away from the everyday usefulness of wearable payments, it is in advanced health sensors, and not basic fitness tracking, where the most ambitious moves in smart straps are being made, all with the Apple Watch at the centre.
In January, the $89 Aura smart strap for the Apple Watch was announced, promising to use bioimpedance analysis to monitor weight, water, fat and muscle. And last September AliveCor, founded by ex-Google VP Vic Gundotra, was granted fast-track status by the FDA in the US for its non-invasive hyperkalemia test, which uses ECG on its KardiaBand, for the Apple Watch, and KardiaMobile app to track levels of potassium in the blood.
If Sony has moved away from fully featured, Google-powered smartwatches for good, then this is the real competition. In contrast, however, the wena smart straps almost feel like a half-hearted attempt at staying in the smartwatch game. Rather than committing to the cause, here Sony is offering services already widely available on devices at uncompetitive price points. We should expect more from the company that invented the Walkman.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
