
Even with everything pouring out of Baselworld 2017, there's still a lack of slim, female-friendly smartwatches out there, but Nowa, a French startup, has made a skinny hybrid dress watch that won't ruin your sleeve game. The watch is now live on Kickstarter, with orders set to ship starting July this year.
The $199 Nowa Shaper is just 9.75mm thick, which is good going compared to the current crop of display smartwatches, the 11.5mm thick Withings Steel HR and 15mm or so Fossil Group hybrids. (Though not quite as slim as the 7.5mm Pebble Time Round).
Read this: The best hybrid smartwatches 2017
It's a 40mm watch face, so it's also not as compact as some, but it's built from stainless steel with a sapphire coating on the glass. There are eight styles to choose from ranging from dressy and business, preppy with white and black watch faces, to blue accents, plus leather and nylon fabric straps.
So what does it do? The features are as simple as you can get on a hybrid: automatic time zone setting, activity tracking, sleep tracking, rejecting calls and selfies. We don't know the tech Nowa is using for tracking and we assume the crown button is used for those last two.
It's water resistant to 30m, compatible with both iOS and Android and will run for up to eight months on one battery.
Backing the Kickstarter campaign for $99 will get you one of 500 Shaper 40mm watches, which'll run $199 to $229 retail. However, you won't get to choose your model at the point of backing, you'll have to hold off on that until later.
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