Montblanc Summit 2 Plus: Another Wear OS watch gets an eSIM
Will this mean more eSIM Wear OS watches with cellular?
- Nearly 20 years writing about tech, and over a decade reviewing wearable tech, VR, and AR products and apps
Montblanc's newest eSIM cellular Wear OS watch hints at more eSIM watches to come.
Montblanc's high-end smartwatch, the Summit 2 Plus, is beautiful. It has a lovely curved sapphire dome crystal and the materials are top-notch. The Summit 2 Plus has eSIM tech, which is something still pretty new to Google's Wear OS watches, even if odds are you're not going to pay $1,170 for one of them. (Huawei had the first Wear OS watch with an eSIM; my story originally mistakenly said Montblanc's was first... but still, there aren't many.)
I looked at the Summit 2 Plus 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 those of many other Wear OS watches (and it runs the same software), Montblanc's case and band design felt pretty great.
Watches with eSIMs easily duplicate your phone's number on your wrist, making cellular-enabled watches easier to set up. They can also support multiple carriers. eSIM setup happens through Google's Wear OS phone app.
Montblanc says the Summit 2 Plus is the "first luxury smartwatch that can directly activate cellular connectivity right in the Wear OS by Google app." More could come. The Summit 2 Plus also adds a speaker for making on-wrist calls.
The Summit 2 Plus specs are otherwise pretty similar to the 2018 version of the Summit watch I got to test-drive a while back: Qualcomm Snapdragon 3100 processor, 43.5mm steel case, 1.28-inch AMOLED display, 440-mAh battery and 22mm watch straps, as well as altimeter, barometer, compass, GPS and heart rate tracking.
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 5 ATM of the previous Summit 2 watch.
This is an overdue feature for Google's Wear OS watches: Samsung's smartwatches and the Apple Watch already have it as an optional feature, while most Wear OS watches seem to skip cellular. Qualcomm's new eSIM support for Wear OS should mean more Wear OS watches with this feature soon, although it's unclear when.
Correction, March 13: This story originally said this was the first smartwatch with eSIM tech. That is not the case.