Google, Tag Heuer team up to create luxury Android Wear smartwatch and take on Apple

‘Apple will get young people used to wearing a watch and later maybe they will want to buy themselves a real watch,’ Tag Heuer’s chief executive said

A Carrera Heuer 01 Automatic Chronograph watch of Swiss watch manufacturer TAG Heuer is displayed at Baselworld fair (REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann)

Tag Heuer will team up with Google and Intel to create a luxury smartwatch and take on the high end Apple Watch Edition, it said today.

Google’s Android Wear platform, which allows smartwatches to pair up with phones, will be integrated into the new watch. It will be the first luxury smartwatch on the platform when it is released before the end of 2015.

Most smartwatches available at the moment cost a few hundred pounds, but Apple pushed those prices when it announced its Apple Watch Edition, in September. That version, which will be released in April and comes in solid gold, will be priced between £8,000 and £13,500.

Tag Heuer’s watch is rumoured to be a smart version of the company’s black Carrera watch. That watch is bulky but sporty, and is one of the company’s most popular models.

"People will have the impression that they are wearing a normal watch," Tag Heuer chief executive Jean-Claude Biver told Reuters in an interview at Baselworld, the watch industry’s annual convention.

At Baselworld, the traditional watch firms said that the Apple Watch is likely to increase the market as a whole, rather than cutting into the established and luxury watch companies’ market share.

"Apple will get young people used to wearing a watch and later maybe they will want to buy themselves a real watch," Biver told Reuters.