Montblanc's newest eSIM cellular WearOS watch hints at more eSIM watches to come.
Scott Stein/CNET
Montblanc's high-end smartwatch, the Summit 2+, is beautiful. It has a lovely curved sapphire dome crystal and the materials are top-notch. The Summit 2+ has eSIM tech, which is something new to Google's WearOS watches, even if odds are you're probably not going to pay $1,170 for one of them.
I looked at the Summit 2+ a few months ago back in Las Vegas during CES, and Montblanc is getting ready to release the watch now. I wore the first Summit for a while, and even though its basic functions are the same as many other WearOS watches (and runs the same software), Montblanc's case and band design felt pretty great.
Watches with eSIMs easily duplicate your phone's number to your wrist, making cellular-enabled watches easier to set up. They can also support multiple carriers. This is a new feature for WearOS watches, and Google is adding eSIM support into the WearOS app alongside the Summit 2+.
Montblanc claims the Summit 2+ is the "first luxury smartwatch that can directly activate cellular connectivity right in the Wear OS by Google app." More are likely to come. The Summit 2+ also adds a speaker for making on-wrist calls.
The Summit 2+ specs are otherwise pretty similar to the 2018 version of the watch I got to test-drive a while back: a Qualcomm Snapdragon 3100 processor, 43.5 mm steel case, 1.28 inch AMOLED display, 440 mAh battery, 22mm watch straps, plus altimeter, barometer, compass, GPS and heart rate.
It's a bit bigger than the previous Summit 2. and comes in black, stainless, rose gold, or bronze colored steel, and has watch faces replicating Montblanc's classic watch designs. There are some extra bonus features (a jet lag-reducing Timeshifter app, and some improved heart rate algorithms and training features developed along with Firstbeat). Water resistance is only IPx8, however, a downgrade from the 5ATM of the previous Summit 2 watch.
This is an overdue feature for Google's WearOS watches: Samsung's smartwatches and the Apple Watch already have it as an optional feature. Qualcomm's new eSIM support for WearOS should mean more WearOS watches with this feature happen soon, although it's unclear when.
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