Kronaby is the Festina Group's Swedish brand and one of the earliest serious attempts at a hybrid connected watch — a watch that looks entirely conventional, with a real dial and real hands, and hides its technology underneath. There is no screen. Information is shown by the hands and a sub-dial with its own scales, notifications arrive through a vibration motor, and the two pushers and the crown are mapped to whichever functions the wearer chooses in the companion app. The design is Scandinavian in the plainest sense: nothing on the dial announces what the watch can do.
The practical consequence of leaving out a screen is the battery, which runs up to two years on a standard cell, so the watch is never taken off to charge. The functions are chosen rather than imposed: automatic time zone, an additional time zone read on the sub-dial, date, a silent vibrating alarm, filtered notifications so only the people and events that matter get through, an inactivity reminder, step tracking through an accelerometer with a daily goal, a timer, music control, a camera remote, find-my-phone, and call rejection with a press on the crown.
It is the outlier in the Festina Group portfolio — the only brand in it built around software as much as watchmaking, with the app and functions developed in-house — and it sits alongside the group's connected work for Lotus and Jaguar, developed at its technology centre in Sweden.