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Solar Powered Smartwatch Successfully Crowdfunded on Kickstarter (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Verge:
Battery life on smartwatches is, in a word, bad. And while most of today's watches can more or less make it through a day without dying, they're still a far cry from the months or even years that traditional watches can run for. What if you never had to charge your smartwatch? That's the promise of Lunar, a new Kickstarter project that claims to be the world's first solar-powered smartwatch... The company says that the watch can charge off both indoor and outdoor light, and can run off as little as one hour of exposure a day. (The company also includes a traditional inductive charger as a backup.)
As for the watch itself, it's a pretty standard hybrid smartwatch, solar power aside. It'll be able to do basic activity and sleep tracking, offer some limited notification support through a colored LED, and automatically set time zones through a connected smartphone app. Also, given the need for low power consumption for the solar charging to feasibly work, there's no screen on the Lunar. Instead, there's just a ring of LED lights located where hour markers would be.
The campaign reached its funding goal wIthin two days of launching -- and one week later had double that amount, raising a total of $101,987 from 564 backers.
It's not clear if Slashdot readers love or hate smartwatches. Does it make a difference if the watch is solar powered?
As for the watch itself, it's a pretty standard hybrid smartwatch, solar power aside. It'll be able to do basic activity and sleep tracking, offer some limited notification support through a colored LED, and automatically set time zones through a connected smartphone app. Also, given the need for low power consumption for the solar charging to feasibly work, there's no screen on the Lunar. Instead, there's just a ring of LED lights located where hour markers would be.
The campaign reached its funding goal wIthin two days of launching -- and one week later had double that amount, raising a total of $101,987 from 564 backers.
It's not clear if Slashdot readers love or hate smartwatches. Does it make a difference if the watch is solar powered?
is solar powered? no. next question.
Maybe I'm missing some sort of killer feature; but it looks like their power budget forced them to axe a pretty substantial percentage of the 'smart'; while still tying the watch to a phone(and the hope that it won't lose most of its utility if the company bleeds out and stops updating their little app) and keeping power draw high enough that you do at least sometimes have to worry about the battery, unlike non-smart watches which draw so little power that the solar ones usually run for the life of the device and the battery powered ones have battery lives in years rather than hours.
I could see the notification LED maybe being useful if you already have your phone's constant demands for attention pared down enough that a simple "$APP$ is bothering you" indicator, without room for displaying 'from', 'subject', or anything of that sort would actually be helpful; but my experience has been that 'social' apps are relentless about their notification spam because user engagement metrics are the stuff of which inflated valuations are built; and email notifications are hard to make helpful without at least knowing you the message is from; or that it has passed a particular set of filter rules; because most mailboxes get a constant torrent of low value chatter.
I, um, guess it's less silly looking than the rubbery-bracelet style activity trackers? And the advertising photos imply that it will make me a rugged outdoorsman enjoying an active lifestyle and adequate vitamin D? Plus, the advanced 'have your watch tell you if the sun has risen or set' feature!