If you need to turn your dumb watch into a smartwatch and don’t mind a parasitic ring of plastic attached to your analog timepiece, then Victorinox and Acer have you covered. The Cybertool offers multiple timezone displays, activity monitoring, and call and message notifications that appear on the ring around the watch. A Help function transmits your current GPS coordinates to a pre-set phone recipient.
The Cybertool (which borrows its name from a dot-com era pocket knife) is designed to work with Victorinox’s INOX watches although there might be some way to retrofit it onto another similarly sized watch (don’t hold your breath.)
It will cost about $225 when it goes on sale and the INOX watch costs about $600. It’s a clever addition to the smart-dumb-watch canon although I doubt it will see much interest outside of a few die-hard Victorinoxers. It’s a fun idea, though, and the first time I’ve seen a low cost version of this sort of add on, the first from Linde Werdelin which was clever and also wildly expensive. You can read a bit more about the new parasite here.
