Swatch says it’s working on “revolutionary battery” for smartwatches and cars

The first smartwatch that lasts six months on a charge has a major advantage, says CEO.

Credit: Swatch

The CEO of Swatch, one of the world's largest watch makers, says his company will release a "revolutionary battery" next year, "not only for watches, but also for automobiles."

The comments come from extracts of an interview with CEO Nick Hayek in the Swiss weekly Handelszeitung. Reuters confirmed Hayek's statements with a Swatch spokesperson.

In the interview, Hayek is asked—somewhat unsurprisingly—about the Apple Watch, and whether it's a threat to the Swiss watch industry (TAG Heuer, Omega, Rolex, and many of the other watch giants are all headquartered in Switzerland). Hayek seems fairly unfazed by smartwatches, saying that the move towards mobile computing is a good thing for watchmakers, because the more that people are on the move, the more likely they are to want to wear and use a watch. It's "an opportunity for us" to sell more watches he told Handelszeitung.

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Swatch isn't going to stick to just mechanical watches, though; in March, the company announced that it would introduce new watches with NFC (for contactless payments) and Bluetooth (to display notifications from your smartphone). The first of those watches, the Touch Zero One (pictured above), is meant to arrive later this month and cost $160 (~£100), but presumably some other smarter Swatch watches are on the way too.

As to what this "revolutionary battery" might be, we're not sure. In the interview, Hayek implies that Swatch and Renata (Swatch's battery company) are working on a battery that can power a smartwatch for six months. Given that current smartwatches only last for a day or two on a single charge, and that battery capacity only generally increases by around 10 percent per year, a smartwatch that lasts six months would be a stretch—but it might be possible, if you removed the backlit display and did most of the processing off-board (on a smartphone).

Hayek's mention of automobiles is interesting, too; if Swatch/Renata really has developed some kind of magical battery chemistry with significantly higher capacity than existing lithium-ion batteries, then I'm sure the automotive industry will be interested. This is turning into a bit of a fracas, with computer companies making smartwatches, watch companies making smartwatches and batteries, and car companies making household batteries.