The Chairman Calls

by Michael Thompson

While many watch companies have made their dials appear on iPhone screens, only a handful have gone the distance to develop a genuinely new design for a mobile phone. While we’ve seen cell phones from TAG Heuer, Porsche Design, Chanel, Casio, and several fashion brands, no firm has opted to merge horology with smartphone technology in quite the same manner as Ulysse Nardin has done with its Chairman.
Built as a luxury smartphone from the ground up, the Chairman was introduced at last year’s BaselWorld and is already being used to place calls, send text messages and take hi-resolution pictures. But unlike any other mobile smart handset available, the Chairman performs these workaday communication chores with the luxury and iconic design cues seen on Ulysse Nardin watches—including a winding crown and an oscillating weight visible through a sapphire exhibition back on the handset, essentially echoing watch rotor placement.
The rotor and the crown (stainless steel for the steel model and 22-karat gold for the solid gold version) do more than simply look nice. The rotor’s oscillations power a secondary battery within the phone that supplies limited supplementary power. And as with a watch, winding the crown on the Chairman also revs the battery, renewing power to the phone.
In other words, should you find your Chairman’s power on the wane, just wave to your friends with this phone in hand or wind the crown. Either type of motion will add a timely jolt of power, just as they would on any Ulysse Nardin timepiece.
“The incorporation of unsurpassed horological expertise with cutting-edge cellular technology truly sets the Chairman apart from any and all competition,” says Bobby Yampolsky, co-founder of SCI Innovations, the firm that is developing the Chairman in conjunction with Ulysse Nardin. Yampolsky’s Florida-based retail jewelry store East Coast Jewelry has worked with the brand for many years. His partner at SCI Innovations, Morten Nielsen, adds, “I am confident the Chairman will transform the marketplace and how consumers regard their mobile devices.”
“The rotor and the crown are the real thing,” says Patrick Hoffman, Ulysse Nardin’s U.S. president. “They are the Ulysse Nardin DNA inside the Chairman.” As a result, it’s likely that more than a few Chairman users will also be wearing timepieces made by Ulysse Nardin. The luxury smartphone series represents a major milestone for Ulysse Nardin, notes Yampolsky.
“The Chairman is the first non-timepiece product bearing the Ulysse Nardin badge since the inception of the brand more than 160 years ago. We have created an item from the same DNA of the Ulysse Nardin family and embodied Ulysse Nardin’s core values of expert craftsmanship, innovation prowess, heritage and timeless style.”
 
Android inside
Smart mobile phones have undoubtedly lead the way in the personal devices arena in recent years as a critical mass of users now pocket either a Blackberry, Palm, iPhone or Nexus One. In fact, the latter device, the much-discussed Nexus One from Google, features that company’s own Android operating system, which is the same system utilized by the Chairman.
“We decided a year ago to use this open platform because it gives our designers and engineers a tremendous amount of freedom in creating useful applications with impressive capabilities,” explains Yampolsky. “Using this operating system also gives our customers an interface that is intuitive to navigate and easy to use.”
Indeed, like Apple’s iPhone the various mobile devices now available with Google’s Android inside are able to download thousands of independent applications that make both platforms favorites among multi-taskers. Watch firms too have been active here, and will likely expand their current iPhone apps to include Android users as the phones become more utilized worldwide. 

Fingerprints
Compatible with the world’s GSM networks, the Chairman was built from the ground up with the idea that the primary user would be a busy business executive. Considering such a user’s requirement for added privacy, Ulysse Nardin has added a fingerprint recognition reader that can be customized for the user to limit access to all files or to any files on the phone, or to limit who can actually place a call on the Chairman.