Thanks to a carefully orchestrated teasing campaign, potential customers of the new connected watch Alpiner X were already aware of its existence during SIHH week through a series of targeted ads on Facebook. I mentioned this in my interview with Peter Stas a few weeks ago and was quickly offered the opportunity to be the first journalist to test this new watch.

As a pre-millennial, there is something reassuring for me in the Alpiner X. anyone who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s will not find his "ana-digi" display strange and the operation by the crown and push buttons will instantly seem intuitive. The high-resolution touch screen and daily loading may look more familiar to younger watch enthusiasts, but this runs counter to at least two of the objectives of this new smart watch. First of all, it is designed for people who have outdoor activities, the kind that doesn't have access to charging points at the top of a glacier at an altitude of 3,000 meters, for example. Second, it has a sleep cycle alarm function that is really useful only if you wear the watch while sleeping, a period that most other connected watch users use to recharge them.

I like the fact that Alpina chose a direction for this watch and stuck to it. Rather than trying to please everyone, the Alpiner X is resolutely oriented to the outdoors and has the proper functions for this environment. All of this works without the watch having to be synchronized with your phone.

My daily drive to the nearest station was a perfect opportunity to test the reading of altitudes since this short trip of barely five minutes covered a height difference of 250 metres, which the Alpiner X faithfully reproduced thanks to a cliff-shaped graph in the associated application. But the Alpiner X requires a more complete test, so I took it with me on a weekend walk to an isolated town called Solalex, at the western foot of the Swiss Diablerets massif. In summer it is a paradise for walkers, but in winter it is only accessible on foot (or by snowmobile) and therefore an area reserved for snowshoe hikers or cross-country skiers. Thanks to the Alpiner X, I was able to record a 9 km walk with a drop of several hundred meters (although it seemed more in the snow, given that the starting altitude was already 1,200 meters).

Alpiner X outdoor Smart Watch ©Alpina

To record your sleep phases, you can wear the watch or leave it under your pillow. Here's another touch of nostalgia that I enjoyed: the old-fashioned sound signals that wake you up at the ideal time of your sleep cycle depending on the window you set up in the app before the required wake-up time. A similar, more discreet tone occasionally sounds to remind you that you have been inactive for too long, something that happens with alarming regularity when I am writing to my office.

In my eyes, the best thing about the Alpiner X, and by far, it's a watch. I mean, it's not a screen. It is always plugged in and a simple look at the dial gives you the time, without delay. The orange accents on the dial and bracelet of the model I tested undeniably define it as a sports watch but also make it easily readable. The digital display is compact and discreet, but contains all the necessary information. And the subtle detail that always makes me smile is when the hands of hours and minutes slip elegantly from the digital display as soon as you activate one of the functions so that you can see it clearly.

Although the watch was presented at Baselworld, its real launch is based on a Kickstarter campaign. Unlike other campaigns of this kind, which are usually used to raise funds in advance to finance a new watch, Alpina uses Kickstarter more as a marketing exercise since the company is far from being a start-up. As Peter SAS explains in the interview cited above, e-commerce is becoming of strategic importance to the brand, and the data collected through this type of campaign is likely to be very useful.

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