Garmin Fenix 8 Pro microLED could get its first rival: Tag Heuer Connected Calibre E5 to launch shortly

Tag Heuer has published a teaser website confirming that a brand-new smartwatch will be unveiled on Wednesday, October 8. The teaser website does not reveal any details about the new smartwatch, but it is reasonable to assume that the Tag Heuer Connected Calibre E4 is finally getting a true successor after more than three years, as the manufacturer's current generation of smartwatches was announced back in February 2022.

The new flagship smartwatch is expected to receive at least two significant upgrades. First, the manufacturer could retire the outdated Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100+ and opt for the current Snapdragon W5 Gen 2. This would replace the old processor with four ARM Cortex-A57 efficiency cores clocked at up to 1.7GH with a chipset that is much more efficient due to its four Cortex-A53 cores and 4nm manufacturing process instead of 12nm. Satellite connectivity is also supported by this new SoC.

Even more exciting is that Tag Heuer has been developing a microLED panel for smartwatches in collaboration with AU Optronics for years. This suggests that the Tag Heuer Connected Calibre E5 might become the second smartwatch in the world with a microLED display. This technology recently debuted on the Garmin Fenix 8 Pro microLED. Garmin’s smartwatch has a display brightness of 4,500 nits, compared to approximately 3,000 nits on the Fenix 8 Pro AMOLED (from $1,199 on Amazon). However, the microLED version is also more expensive, so the display could certainly affect the price of Tag Heuer's next smartwatch as well.