Montblanc’s first smartwatch outing with the Summit was sadly feature-thin. Fortunately, all that changed in 2018 when the company announced the Summit’s successor. The Summit 2 was a luxury smartwatch that not only looked high-end, but was powerful, too, helped along by the fact that it was the first luxury smartwatch to utilise Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 3100 chipset.
Now Montblanc has announced its third Summit iteration, the Summit 2+, and it builds on its predecessor in all the best – albeit small – ways.
The principal upgrade the Summit 2+ makes over the previous version is that the smartwatch is finally going cellular. With the Summit 2+, You can now make calls, reply to texts and access internet services such as Google Assistant without having to be anywhere near your phone. The upgrade might sound small, but it makes Montblanc the first of the major luxury brands to announce a standalone smartwatch with cellular connectivity, even if the Apple Watch has had this ability since 2017 and has offered a call-making Hermès version since then.
There are some additional minor differences which lie in the detail, but the Summit 2+ is really all about the smartwatch’s shift to cellular. What also makes it worthy of that plus sign however is the inclusion of something that the company rather loftily calls an “outdoor toolbox”, comprising a speedometer, altimeter, barometer, compass and a GPS.
Like the Summit 2, it has a fairly compact 1.28-inch AMOLED display with sapphire glass covering the screen, and seems as simple to use as the Summit 2, featuring two pusher buttons and one rotating crown that acts as a third button. And again, it runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 processor.
The Summit 2+ is slightly bigger than its predecessor, with a 43.5mm steel case compared to the smaller Summit 2’s 42mm. With that additional room, Montblanc has been able to fit in an integrated GPS and a bigger 440mAh battery that the company claims will last a full day. And like the Summit 2, you can extend the battery life by two to five days by turning it into a ‘dumb’ watch.
Perhaps the best thing about a Montblanc smartwatch in dumb mode is that it doesn’t look like a dorky smartwatch, instead keeping its stylish Montblanc 1858-inspired design when it’s offline, setting it apart from smartwatches like the Fitbit and Apple Watch.
It’s also as customisable as the Summit 2, with 1,000 different watch-face configurations. The case comes in a range of new colour options including rose-gold coloured steel and bronze-coloured steel. As well as the classic black DLC steel and stainless steel varieties. And you can, naturally, have your choice of wrist strap.
On the fitness side, the Summit 2+ has a more refined VO2-max workout coach, a virtual fitness assistant that recommends personalised exercises, automatically adjusting to your physical training requirements and intensity levels. The heart-rate sensor wasn’t the best in the Summit 2, so it’s good to see that Montblanc has said that it has improved on the heart-rate algorithm. It’s also more waterproof than its predecessor, with a rating of IPX8, meaning you can take the wearable swimming deeper than one metre.
The Summit 2+ additionally contains much of the worthwhile bits of Montblanc’s second-generation smartwatch, like Google Pay, the Montblanc Travel Info app and Timeshifter, an app to help you recalibrate from jet lag after switching time zones.
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