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Louis Vuitton is the latest luxury fashion brand to jump on the Android Wear train

Louis Vuitton is the latest luxury fashion brand to jump on the Android Wear train

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It’s become a trend of late for luxury fashion brands to create their own Android Wear watches, taking virtually homogenous hardware and remixing it with their own branded take on things. We’ve already seen it with Tag Heuer, Montblanc, Movado, Hugo Boss,  Diesel, Emporio Armani, Michael Kors, and Tommy Hilfiger, and now it’s apparently time for Louis Vuitton — one of the giants of designer fashion — to take its swing at it.

Thus, the Louis Vuitton Tambour Horizon, the first smartwatch offering from the famed designer company. Style-wise, the Tambour Horizon is very similar to the company’s more traditional Tambour watch, but swaps the physical hardware for a digital update to Google’s Android Wear 2.0 platform. Along with the standard Android Wear features, Louis Vuitton is adding some custom watchfaces based on its existing product lineup, along with some flight-tracking and city guide features.

Interestingly (although perhaps unsurprisingly), Louis Vuitton isn’t really marketing this as an Android Wear watch. Sure, it mentions that the Tambour Horizon is powered by Android Wear, but the dramatic, actor-filled promotional video pontificates more on the nature of time and how it connects your journey through life than technical hardware or what apps it can run.

That said, the company is offering a few details on specs. The Tambour Horizon features a 390 x 390 AMOLED touchscreen underneath a sapphire crystal, while the watch itself offers a 42mm, stainless steel case. The company hasn’t mentioned what processor the Tambour Horizon uses, but odds are that it’s using the same Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100 chip that almost everyone else is using.

Of course, since it’s a Louis Vuitton watch, despite having almost identical hardware to virtually every other Android Wear watch on the market, it starts at $2,450 for the regular stainless steel model, and $2,900 for the black variant. It also doesn’t feature a heart rate monitor, instead using the caseback for a sapphire crystal Louis Vuitton logo. That said, given that the similarly styled Louis Vuitton Escale Time Zone mechanical watch runs for $7,200, it could be argued that the smartwatch version is a relative bargain. (The mechanical version offers a bespoke movement designed in-house at Louis Vuitton, making it a far more attractive purchase for the price, but I digress.)

The use of mass-produced movements across the luxury fashion industry for branded watches isn’t exactly new, either. While there are certainly exceptions — Louis Vuitton’s higher class of watches included — many of the so-called luxury mechanical watches from companies like Armani, Hugo Boss, and many others simply use cheaper Swiss Ronda or Japanese Miyota movements, and sell you on style instead. It’s no different than what we’re seeing with Android Wear watches today, just replacing the quartz innards with a more modern Qualcomm chip instead.

The Louis Vuitton Tambour Horizon should be available soon from Louis Vuitton.