Frederique Constant's first touchscreen smartwatch could be on the way

After releasing a host of hybrid smartwatches along with a beautiful smart strap over the last few years, traditional watchmaker Frederique Constant could be set to unveil its first touchscreen-packing smartwatch.

The Swiss company has been teasing customers with emails featuring the tag line "Are you ready for the 3.0 watch generation?", accompanied by a futuristic watch graphic and a 'Save The Date'. While this represents an admittedly loose connection to any potential release of a fully fledged smartwatch, we won't know for sure until the watchmaker reveals all in New York on 21 February.

Read this: Our pick of the best hybrid smartwatches

Naturally, there's the possibility that Frederique Constant decides to avoid the smartwatch path and instead update its smart analogue collections. And this wouldn't be the end of the world. The Frederique Constant Horological Smartwatch Classics, despite forcing around 14 syllables from you to say, was easily one of the prettiest hybrids we tried on last year. And while there was a lack of notification support, it did adequately manage to track daily activity and also featured a rich companion app.

But while we would welcome another hybrid with some slight improvements, this does feel like the perfect time for the watchmaker to enter the smartwatch scene and start competing with other luxury brands, such as Tag Heuer (who have, to date, released three touchscreen smartwatches), Montblanc and Louis Vuitton.

If it were to make the leap, the notification woes we experienced with the Horological Classics would be solved, and it would almost certainly run on Android Wear and bolster Google's army of watch partners.

For now, this is all reckless speculation, but more and more quote-unquote traditional watchmakers are exploring touchscreen smartwatches with each passing year. Sooner or later, Constant will surely join the ranks and we might not have to wait too long to find out.