"Instruments for Professionals" Breitling's UK MD Gavin Murphy tells Pocket-lint in a behind closed doors fourth floor meeting room on the opulent Breitling Baselworld 2015 stand at the world's biggest watch trade show.

Murphy has just showed us the new Breitling B55 concept smartwatch and the accompanying app for the iPhone that goes with it.

Unlike other smartwatches at Baselworld, or announced previously by the likes of Pebble, Apple, LG and others, the Breitling B55 isn't about getting your emails on your watch, who's calling you, how many steps you've taken, or even how much sleep you've had. No, the Breitling B55 is about making your watch easier to use.

It is not a problem most of us have, and certainly not one we expected to hear from the company's UK boss, but it turns out Breitling watches are fairly complex devices to use given the array of information that they can deliver or the settings you can customise.

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It is this problem, married with the company's "Instruments for Professionals" mantra, that has lead Breitling to create an app that will let B55 users treat the app as an in-depth dashboard for contorlling their watch.

The B55 connects to a Breitling mobile app via Bluetooth LE to wirelessly communicate with your phone when you need to do something.

At present that means you can use the watch's app to change time zones automatically, thus adjusting the watch's digital display and analogue hands, set alarms, sync timing data to your phone, or merely control whether moving the watch towards you lights up the display.

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For pilots that extension of instruments means they will be able to do things like time flights via the B55's minimal buttons, with the app backing up that data for logging and analysis. Just like your favourite running app, pilots will be able to quickly see lap data, total time, and even which lap is quickest via their phone.

Murphy doesn't rule out further enhancements or different apps in the future either. To create a dedicated log book app for pilots would be possible, for example, because the watch is capturing all the raw data for the app to do all the work.

You can even use the app to bypass the watch's own very accurate Quartz movement by syncing time from your phone. Handy for timezone hoppers.

First impressions

Take away the dedicated smartphone app and the B55 watch is just as useable as any other Breitling. For all its intelligence, the B55 sports a remarkably traditional "Breitling" design and it is worth noting that the final design has yet to be finalised, and that yes that blue Wi-Fi looking logo will go.

Solid, weighty, and comfortable on the wrist, this is about offering yet another way to access your data rather than be restricted by a small single time screen on the watch face. From talking with Murphy, Breitling aren't about to go for smartwatch gimmicks or a full touchscreen experience any time soon.

Breitling's smartwatch isn't smart in the same way the likes of Apple, LG, Mondaine, or others dominating the headlines at the moment are, but the key factor here is that it is smart for the company's customers likely to be interested in buying it.

It will be those pilots and Breitling fans that use and rely on the capabilities of the watches today already, that we suspect will be joining the queue to get the B55 when it goes on sale later this year.