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Home / News / Victorinox makes analogue watches smart with mad INOX Cybertool add-on

Victorinox makes analogue watches smart with mad INOX Cybertool add-on

Ridiculous looking upgrade kit gives your analogue watch some modern smarts

We knew Acer had teamed up with Victorinox for a mystery wearable, and that it would be getting a Mobile World Congress reveal – we just didn’t expect it to be completely bonkers.

The Cybertool INOX isn’t a smart watch. Instead, it’s a smart upgrade kit designed to give your existing analogue watch a smart overhaul. 

You’ll be able to add timer, stopwatch, step tracking, calories burnt, reminders and call notifications to any analogue INOX, and a 5-7 day battery life means you won’t run out of juice in a hurry.

The whole thing is IPx7 waterproof, so you’ll be able to get it wet (assuming your regular watch is equally water resistant) and it plays nicely with both Android and iOS.

There’s even a distress signal mode, which sends a message to a pre-assigned number using the GPS coordinates from your phone. Buttons around the outside let you adjust the modes and features.

That’s all well and good on paper, but in practice the clip-on case is comically big. There’s no way you’ll be able to slip it under a shirt cuff without popping a button, and the combination of black plastics look pretty cheap compared to the watch underneath.

The blue LCD display has a seriously low resolution panel, and doesn’t even go the whole way around the bezel.

That bezel completely covers up the one on your analogue watch, by the way, so any hope of staying stylish is gone. There’s a hole for getting to the crown without disassembling the whole thing, but it looks seriously tight to get your fingers in there.

The idea is that you don’t have to wear it all the time, only fitting it onto your analogue watch when you need the smart features – but based on the laughable looks we’re not convinced anyone’s going to want to wear it at all.

Profile image of Tom Morgan-Freelander Tom Morgan-Freelander Deputy Editor

About

A tech addict from about the age of three (seriously, he's got the VHS tapes to prove it), Tom's been writing about gadgets, games and everything in between for the past decade, with a slight diversion into the world of automotive in between. As Deputy Editor, Tom keeps the website ticking along, jam-packed with the hottest gadget news and reviews.  When he's not on the road attending launch events, you can usually find him scouring the web for the latest news, to feed Stuff readers' insatiable appetite for tech.

Areas of expertise

Smartphones/tablets/computing, cameras, home cinema, automotive, virtual reality, gaming