14 DAY TRIAL // Do you remember the huge Neptune Pine smartwatch which was the first wearable to arrive with phone calling capabilities, even before the Samsung Gear S came along?
Well, the company has a new product called the Neptune Duo, which is actually made up of two separate devices.
One of them is a chunky wristband called the Neptune Hub that basically bundles all the functionalities of a smartphone. The other one (the Pocket) is a wireless display for the Hub, which looks like your regular smartphone, but is actually just a dummy prop.
Neptune Duo is a reversed smartwatch
So basically, the Neptune Duo reverses the roles of the smartphone and the smartwatch. The reason behind this is to help us break the obsessive bonds we have with our smartphones.
Which begs the question: will placing the smartphone on our wrist instead of in our pockets achieve this? The creators of the Neptune Duo seem to think this is case, although we’re pretty skeptical about that.
In the specifications department, the Neptune Hub packs a quad-core processor, health tracking sensors, LTE and GPS. The smartphone prop bundles 64GB of internal storage and also has Bluetooth, NFC and runs Android 5.0 Lollipop out of the box.
The screen technology Neptune will utilize with the Duo device is yet to be determined, but OLED and E-Ink are strong candidates for the job.
As for the Pocket, it's just a simple screen with a battery, basically just an interface for the Hub. It's not a smart device.
The battery inside the Neptune Hub is pretty skimpy (1,000 mAh), but the creators of the thing claim you can go ahead and hook up the Hub to the Pocket (2,800 mAh inside) when you want to recharge it. It’s certainly an out-of-the-box solution, but it doesn't seem too convenient in a day-to-day usage scheme.
It's hard to believe the Neptune Duo will convince a lot of people
It seems quite unlikely at this point that users today would be comfortable in abandoning their smartphones to take up a chunky bracelet to use throughout the day.
Even so, if you’re a geek and you like geeky stuff, you might look at the Neptune Duo as some sort of prop that stepped off the set of Sci-Fi movie. If you want one, pre-orders have opened. You’ll need to take $49 / €43 out of your pocket Initially, with $649 / €570 due when the order arrives.
