WERET SMARTWATCH FOR SURFERS
Check out the Weret Smartwatch as featured in the September issue of Windsurf Magazine
In life as you grow older you have to take on the mantle of responsibility, so while sitting in a boardroom or similar setting of importance, wouldn’t it be good if there was a watch out there that offers the ability to surreptitiously check the forecasted wind or surf by looking at your wrist, and then leave rapidly when it looks good? Well the good old Swedes, masters of design, have come up with exactly that with the ‘Weret’ range of analog smartwatches, using data from UK surf boffins, magicseaweed.com.
And knowing that we at the Windsurf office need to be aware exactly when to make poor excuses to skive off to the beach, the ‘Weret’ team sent us the “world’s first connected smartwatch for surfers” to fight over while trying to duck out of all things work related. Straight out of the box it looks like the sort of watch submarine commanders wear to blow things up at the right time, with lots of dials, numbers and hands. Digging deeper into the box and things start getting very James Bond with an inductive charging pad and USB cable. Setup is simple, you just ask a 7 year old to do it while you have a cup of tea, well that’s what we would normally do, but seeing as the boss was watching we had to do it ourselves in the name of science. Actually it only took a few minutes to download the ‘Weret’ app to our smartphone and pair the watch via Bluetooth, but we still put it down on our timesheets as a full day’s work.
The watch is a chunky 89 g case without straps and is built with Swiss technology in 316L pure surgical stainless steel construction with anti-reflective, anti-scratch coated sapphire crystal glass, and a claimed water resistance of up to 100 metres, so no need to take it off when waterstarting thank goodness.
A charging time of 2-3 hours will get you 3 months in normal use say ‘Weret’, so you can go on holiday between charges, maybe even two holidays if you’re really posh. The hands of the watch act as the Bluetooth antenna and once connected to your smartphone, and provided you have an internet connection, the time is automatically set and you get to choose what forecast data set you want displayed – ‘Wave’, ‘Wind’ or ‘Weather’, and from what beach you wish to be kept informed of. At the push of a button, the hands and dials will then toggle between displaying time or forecast, with the ‘Wind’ theme for instance displaying wind speed in Beaufort force, m/s or mph, as well as wind direction, tidal state, pressure and temperature. Other buttons on the watch can be configured for ‘Media control’, so press to play/pause and hold to skip a track on your smartphone, and a useful “Find my phone” feature which triggers a vibration or sound alert.
The watch itself is available in a range of 3 designs (scale available in Celsius (C°) / mBar or Fahrenheit (F°) / inHg) with various interchangeable strap options and comes with a 2-year warranty. At $475, it’s not cheap, and doesn’t come with any guarantee you will get wind and sun at the same time in the UK, but it’s a limited edition and if you like your windsurf gadgets you probably had already clicked ‘add to cart’ when we first mentioned ‘data’. To buy or get more information, see www.weret.com.
