(Pocket-lint) - The trouble with many smartwatches is that when the screen isn't on, they are a hunk of metal or plastic on your arm doing nothing.

Not the Kairos, a new smartwatch that hopes to let you have your cake and it eat it, so to speak, by featuring a fully working mechanical watch and a smartwatch via a second screen all within the same casing.

Having caught up with the Kairos smartwatch at MWC, we've now had a second play at Baselworld in Basel with a more finalised design and a second smartwatch from the company: The Kairos icon.

Both the Kairos smartwatches feature a see-through transparent TOLED screen for delivering notifications and other data, while still letting you see the mechanical watch hands underneath when nothing else is happening. The difference with the Icon is that rather than specific notifications you get an icon that you've got an email or someone is calling, but nothing more.

The end result, while looking incredibly futuristic and cool, does leave you with a rather cloudy watch face (60 per cent transparency) that looks like you've covered it in tracing paper, but it is certainly a great first stab and goes one step into solving the one day battery life issue common in many dedicated smartwatch competitors.

Unlike Android Wear devices or the Apple Watch, which are locked to specific operating systems, the Kairos will work with all three major platforms: Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.

The Kairos also features a number of sensors making it suitable for fitness tracking, is powered by an ARM cortex M4 processor, and has a battery life said to last for around two to three days.

The company says it can boast a longer battery life because power is only consumed in order to display notifications as they come in, rather than the time - a claim similar, and true, of the Pebble smartwatch.

An accompanying app pushes notifications to your timepiece as well as offering camera functions and music playback. Kairos Watches will keep track of every step you take towards your fitness goals with activity and sleep tracking powered by Misfit.

The watch will come with a number of different style and material options with prices starting at $549 and rising to $1,249 for a limited edition version of 1,000 units.

For those that just want to get their regular watch "smart" the company is also developing an intelligent strap that will relay messages or notifications like a stock ticker tape.

Writing by Stuart Miles.