The makers of the Neptune Pine smartwatch are back… and this time they’re a little more ambitious.
While the Pine stands out in the smartwatch space by offering all the functionality of a tiny Android smartphone on your wrist, the Neptune Suite puts a bigger, more powerful screen on your wrist… and then gives you a bunch of wireless accessories that let you interact with it as if you were using a phone, tablet, or notebook.
Neptune plans to sell the Suite for $899 if and when it hits the streets in about a little under a year, but early backers of the company’s crowfunding campaign on Indiegogo can request one for a pledge of $599 or more.
So the suite actually has several components. There’s the Neptune Hub, which is a sort of smartwatch with a color touchscreen display, integrated WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, NFC, and LTE.
You can use the Hub to view the time, send messages, or perform other tasks. It’s actually the brains of the whole operation, housing the processor, RAM, storage, and just about everything else.
But if you want a bigger screen for watching videos, surfing the web, checking Facebook, or other activities, there’s the Pocket Screen. It’s basically a 5 inch wireless accessory with a capacitive touchscreen and front and rear cameras. It looks like a phone, but it’s really more like a remote control for apps running on the Hub.
Need something a bit bigger? There’s a 10 inch Tab Screen which works just like the Pocket Screen… but bigger. It has a front-facing camera so you can it for video calls as well as videos, gaming, and more.
Neptune Keys is the name of a wireless keyboard that you can use with the Tab Screen to create a laptop-like setup. Or you can just use it as a wireless keyboard for entering text directly on the Neptune Hub.
Want to run apps on your TV? The Neptune Dongle is an HDMI stick that you plug into your display to beam apps from your wrist to your TV, sort of like a Google Chromecast.
Finally there’s the Neptune Headset which is just a set of wireless headphones that comes with the full suite.
Worried that the Hub won’t have enough battery life to make it through the day? It has a 1000 mAh battery which is half as much as you’d expect from a modern smartphone. But it also has a smaller, less power-hungry screen. More importantly, the Pocket Screen has a 2800 mAh battery and the Tab Screen has a 7000 mAh battery. You can use either as a portable power pack to charge your Hub while you’re on the go if the wristband runs out of juice. The Neptune Headset also works as a charging cable for connecting your devices to one another.
The concept sounds pretty slick, and Neptune has actually produced consumer hardware in the past, so it’s possible the company could pull off this project. But it’s an awfully ambitious project. The Indiegogo page is filled with rendered images rather than pictures of real products. And there’s plenty of room things to go wrong between now and the estimated launch date of February, 2016.
And hardware that looks decent today might be less impressive in a year.
Neptune says the Hub will have a 1.8 GHz quad-core processor, 64GB of storage, a 2.4 inch capacitive touchscreen, a nano SIM card, a heart-rate sensor, speaker, micr, and motion sensors, while the 5 inch screen will have a 720p display and the 10 inch screen will have a 1080p display.
The screens and Hub will supports WiGig technology so they can connect to one another using the high-speed wireless technology.
via Android Central
Very ambitious, but I have to ask why. Why is it necessary for the brain to be on your wrist? If im going to carry around one of these accessories anyways?
I already carry around a smartphone, why would i want to put my smartphone’s cpu on my wrist? I see no purpose to this product at all.
If the purpose is to make my documents more portable, cloud services already do that.
Bluetooth for transferring picture? Ha, good luck with that! Either you use some ridiculously low resolution and get some choppy 480×320 15fps picture or you use WiFi to do the same and would still get big-ass latency on any meaningful resolution. Don’t want to ruin the party, but this simply won’t fly. Don’t let me get started on the CPU-on-your-wrist concept either. It will literally burn you, expect 85 C from a reasonable CPU housed in a watch without active cooling or space to give off heat. 1000mAh would be able to run the mojo for maybe 2-3 hours, after that you put the charger cable to your wrist (it’s a watch). Man, will you look stupid. My point? This thing is fake, that’s why it’s on indiegogo and not on kickstarter, no need for working prototype. Don’t support this.
They already had a kickstarter and it finished….Learn your facts before you start to post randomly. Also the Kickstarter was just for the watch and the pocket screen not the suite. ADDITIONALLY you are a moron for thinking that you are strapping a full blow cpu onto your arm is a QUALCOMM mobile process that ALL PHONES TODAY USE! The watch would get as hot as the phone you use today.
Do you mean the original Pine? Yes, but they promised much less that time. It was (is) a dumbed down Android device with a ridiculous size and a wristband. Kinda like the Pipboy from the Fallout game.
https://www.designboom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/neptune-pine-smartwatch-designboom-03.jpg
This time however the promise is in fact that you get the guts (the hub) on your watch (on your wrist) and the rest are just connected screens with batteries. Yes, they could use an ultra low power Cortex M4 (in fact that would be better, the Pebble Time uses that), and each slave device could have it’s own CPU, but that’s not the promise. Go watch the video (I did), and they tell you, you get a smartwatch and a bunch of screens connected to that. Most smartwatches uses the Snapdragon 400 series, but they usually disable 3 cores out of the 4 and the one running is also using a lower clockspeed. You can’t do that with a FullHD tablet. Or you could, but it will be really slow (think 2011 cheap Android tablet slow), and your “wristcomputer” would still use up the battery in a few hours (or less, but I’m generous and expect a longer battery life that the specs indicate). And there is still a problem with the wireless picture transferring. So, it either don’t work because the CPU is slow, or it will work, but will overheat on your wrist.
How to fix this? Each device should have it’s own CPU and operating system, but they could share the filesystem. Think dropbox style syncing of all of your drive, but on a device-to-device mesh network, either Bluetooth or favorably WiFi. In this case the watch can use a low power CPU that wouldn’t overheat and suck dry the battery, the tablet a high power one, they wouldn’t need to move massive data on wireless all the time (only need to sync small files, like what apps are running, app cache, settings and other small things) and would still look like one connected device.
But they explicitly said in the video, that the core of the whole thing is on your wrist and all the clients are dumb terminals, so please check your facts before you start arguing. Also, no need to caps.
Edit: turns out they donated $700000 to their own project. So there is a project, that wants to use unexisting technology, only asked for $100000 to make it, but still decided to fund it’s campaign’s goal 7 times over on it’s own. Why start the campaign at all then? This is what I call clear indicators that something shady is going on.
All I see is multiple devices to have to maintain instead of one.
The accessory market also has fiendish implications as well.
Why did we work so hard to bring so much together in smart phones only to have them broken apart into separate pieces again when the only ones that seem to really benefit are the people marketing them?
a very spy-able / hackable device I’d say
The charging cable headphones is genius though!
Projects like this is the kind of tech I dream about. I don’t know why, but the slim client idea really does it for me. I would like to see it the idea more modular however.
What I would love to see:
Smart Watch – Basically a Pebble with LTE & GPS
Pocket Screen – a 5-6″ WiFi tablet that makes calls and uses the the connectivity of the watch when WiFi is not available.
Tablet – 10-13″ tablet that works the same as the Pocket screen.
TV Stick – sure, but I would probably skip it. (Chromecast or Fire Stick if fine)
If I am fantasizing Then the Watch is the only special thing going on here, The tablet and phone can be whatever tablet and phone I want they just need to be set up to work with the watch as the main connectivity hub. They don’t need to share storage, because most of what I do will be saved to the cloud any way.
Heck if I am really fantasizing then the tablet with the keyboard dock is running windows, and it has a GPU external enclosure (with Ethernet too)
maybe also a robot servant too…. 🙂
I, for one, welcome our new wrist-mounted robot overlords.
Agreed, it’s a great idea with thought process behind it.
Really don’t like how that thing is moving on his arm while he is using it.
64 GB of RAM? Isn’t that a bit excessive? (I assume you meant storage, but what’s the actual RAM?)
Apparently I was wondering how much RAM it would have too… while I was writing about the storage. Got my specs crossed. 🙂
Anyway, thanks for pointing that out. It should be fixed now… but still no idea how much RAM the device will have.
For any project announced this far ahead of release though, I think it’s safe to count the specs as subject to change though.
Before they released the suite it was reported that it will only have 512Mb of RAM. I highly doubt it though now with all the additional devices. It would seem extremely underpowered if it was :(.
*raises hand* “But why would you want the brains on your wrist, why not in the phone or the tablet? Smartwatches have the most difficult dimensions to work with and, as a result, are not as powerful and have worse battery life so why there?”
“shut up” replies the founder of Neptune Suite.
Because the philosophy of Neptune devices has always been wrist-focused. They want to put everything you fundamentally need on your wrist so you can leave your phone at home.
The Pine, Neptune’s other device, was a wrist-worn phone replacement. Could it do EVERYTHING a smartphone can? Not exactly, but it was a start.
Just because a company has a focus on wrist born wearables doesn’t mean this product makes any sense. I wasn’t asking why in a “how did they come up with this” way, but in a “why is this more practical then the alternatives?”
Their thought behind this is that a watch or something strapped to your body would be much harder to get lost or stolen therefore if you were to lose or drop the “pocket screen” it would be much cheaper than buying a whole new device. Not only that but it would also spare you the pain of lost data from having a device lost or stolen since again the idea behind it is, if its strapped to your body its harder to lose. I am not sure how much harder it would be to break if not easier but the mind set is in the right direction.