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“We like to call this a ‘clever watch,’” says Isa Ghani. This Singaporean startup’s newest creation does do typical smartwatch stuff – like count your steps and relay notifications from your phone – but he calls it that because the watch, the Boldr Voyager, doesn’t have a digital screen, but traditional tick-tock hands and a physical watch-face instead.
Rather than throwing the kitchen sink at you (I don’t need that Samsung), or trying to hypnotize you into believing your existence will be useless without it (Apple, you goofs), the startup team at Boldr Watches focused on a handful of features and left it at that.
“I don’t think we’re there with smartwatch technology yet,” Isa, who is in charge of the startup’s marketing, adds. “When you look at them, you’re trying to read tiny messages and tiny pictures, and it’s just not as smart as you’d like it to be.”
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So this hybrid smartwatch doesn’t have any digital screen, but there are embedded LEDs and in-built vibration to alert you to certain notifications from your iPhone or Android device.
Even though the lack of battery life was not done in pursuit of better battery life, it has resulted in the kind of battery range that regular smartwatches can only have electric dreams about – a claimed six months.
Leon Leong, co-founder of the startup, points out that it has two batteries – one for the smart parts, as well as one that lasts three years for the Quartz movement. Also if you wish, you can turn off the Voyager’s clever bits so it becomes just a regular watch.
The Boldr Voyager is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter. It costs US$129 at pre-order price, that’s fifty bucks off the regular retail price once it hits stores. The startup says watch should ship in April 2016.