The Smart Movement category gathers watches that layer sensors, battery-powered electronics and phone connectivity onto the familiar job of telling time. Two distinct families live here. First are hybrids that keep real analogue hands and tuck a tracking module beneath the dial, logging steps, sleep, heart rate and notifications without an obvious screen. Second are fully connected watches whose face is a display, running an operating system such as Wear OS. Frederique Constant was one of the first traditional Swiss houses into this space with the Horological Smartwatch in 2015, then went further in 2018 with the Hybrid Manufacture, fitting an automatic calibre and a smart module into the same case.
The examples spread across a wide range of price and philosophy. The Withings ScanWatch 2 keeps real hands plus a small OLED window, adding ECG, SpO2, body temperature and up to 30 days of battery, offered in 38mm and 42mm from around £320. Garmin's vivomove line (Trend, Style, Luxe) follows the same idea with a touchscreen hidden under the hands, the vivomove Trend landing near £270, though its battery runs about five days rather than weeks. At the upper end, the Frederique Constant Hybrid Manufacture marries a 38-hour automatic movement with calibre analytics that read rate, amplitude and beat error, starting around £2,800. On the full-touchscreen side, the TAG Heuer Connected Calibre E4 was a luxury Wear OS watch, succeeded in late 2025 by the E5, which dropped Wear OS for TAG's own software; used E4 examples typically trade between £320 and £1,600.
Choosing comes down to what you actually want on your wrist. If you value the look of a classic watch and quiet health tracking, an analogue hybrid from Withings or Garmin is the honest answer, accepting a dial instead of a screen and a buzz for alerts. Sort out battery needs first: the Withings runs for weeks, while a Garmin vivomove lasts roughly a working week. If you want full smartwatch behaviour, apps, GPS and contactless payment, something like the Connected delivers it, at the cost of daily charging and software that ages in a few years.
Keep heart-rate accuracy in perspective: hybrids and connected watches are less precise than dedicated sports watches, with reviewers noting 10-15 bpm gaps on the Connected E4 against a chest strap. For a collector who refuses to give up a mechanical movement, the Hybrid Manufacture is a sensible compromise, though long-term support for the connected module is always the open question.