welcome to kickfarted kickfarted is a
new series that we're going to be doing based on crowdfunded projects through
Kickstarter Indiegogo or whatever other platform that ship but don't exactly hit
the mark episode one will be about the Neptune Pine the Neptune Pine is a fully
featured smartphone that goes on your wrist yeah
Intel brings ddr4 to the mainstream with their new core
i76700k and core i56600k processors
check out the link in the video description to learn more the Neptune Pine Kickstarter was
legendary it made waves as a Canadian product we're Canadians here at lonus
Media Group and it was in the local news and stuff this thing made over $800,000
on Kickstarter in the relatively early days and in Canada that's a big deal our
population is less than the state of Cali California so having a new company
that does something like this is cool and a lot of people were excited and so
were the backers because they were making big claims they were saying that
SmartWatches at the time were just notification engines and fitness
trackers they were saying that they weren't living up to the hype they were
saying that they wanted a fully fledged Standalone device on your wrist and that
was awesome and I was so hyped and it was sweet they're even saying that
you're going to have full app support for everything that you wanted you're
going to be able to have video chats with a front- faing camera and you can take high resolution HD videos and
pictures the back facing camera awesome so naturally we bought one we backed the
kickstarter in November of 2013 with the intention of getting a unit lonus
specifically wanted to review it like we do here on lonus Tech tips but a problem
which is not unique to this particular Kickstarter it didn't exactly show up
and naturally when working on many other things we forgot about it then we got an
email about the Neptune Duo a new fancy smartwatch from Neptune with enhanced
features and all this new fun stuff slight problem we didn't have the
Neptune Pine yet lonus emailed them February 18th asked them what was up
what's going on guys they responded shipping notification coming soon sorry
for the inconvenience and you must not have seen the kickstarter updates
interesting wouldn't be too surprised it's lonus he gets tons of emails he
might not have seen it I believed this full-heartedly at the beginning but then
he showed me his inbox and he didn't receive any correspondence from them
between July of 2014 and March of 2015 lonus responds within
2 minutes saying guys I don't want it anymore please cancel my shipment please
give me a refund Etc at this point he doesn't really want the device anymore
it's been too long no point doing a real full formal review he's over it they
don't respond for a long time he sends a bunch of emails in the interim finally
he's like hey guys I kind of can Flex my muscles on social media and make this a
lot worse for everybody they respond saying yeah we informed our Kickstarter
backers there's no more refunds signing off team Neptune neptun pin.com is now
dead it's parked by some random website it's been replaced by get neptune.com
but when you Google Neptune Pine having the first result be a parked website is
kind of odd and the original repository is just kind of gone the kickstarter
page isn't better it hasn't received an update since August there was shipping
notifications apparently from May 2nd of 2014 to February 11th of 2015 that's a
pretty big shipping window and apparently it wasn't even that successful because if you go to the
comment section it's just unfortunate
there's still an ocean of people that haven't received their shipments at
least we got ours eventually so deliverability wise not great so far but
lonus did decide to eventually do a review on it and even carried it around
in his bag for about a month but just decided there was more important things
to do and eventually sheld it anyways we have now decided that it would be a
perfect candidate for kickfarted episode 1 so I guess now it's time to check it
out it's uncomfortable made with very stiff materials and things like the band
that are very not forgiving has a lot of
plastic construction it's very large and unwieldly I don't want to wear it all
day there's certain large watches that are very wearable all day this thing is
not in my opinion the viewing angles of the screen are crap Brandon took this
nice photo of me but if you tilt it to the side you can see that it starts
looking really bad and speaking of the nice photo the color depth murders it
the lighting is very smooth on the real photo it doesn't look very smooth on this screen now we talked about the
camera earlier on if we switch Instagram to camera mode you'll see another
problem that's how that looks that's how my phone makes it look which one would
you choose I'm going to go with the phone basically every time but I guess
let me know in the comments down below you might have noticed too that I was
running in Instagram on here you can't even do that off the start why because
you don't have the Google Play store neptun ninja.com has a great guide on
how to root this thing and then get the play store installed it's really easy to
follow it's a great guide very good write up good job Neptune ninja but
let's admit that shouldn't have to exist
and just because it's good doesn't mean it should okay okay crappy rhyme aside
let's address their direct claims they said that it had a high resolution
rear-facing camera okay let's Benchmark it there's a cool looking bomb over
there that I built a computer in not that long ago you can check out that video up here let's see how it did with
that photo maybe we should retire the
term high resolution I guess they're not technically incorrect here but come on
guys that looks like crap and I don't want to post that anywhere let alone
Instagram which is what I just took the photo with and it's almost
dead a 14% back battery doesn't even
make it through a workday they also claimed that it's the
only Smartwatch that can video chat and while that's true they probably
shouldn't want it to be true you saw how bad the camera was earlier they also
said that it's compatible with tons of apps and yeah as we discussed earlier if
you root the phone and force Google Play onto it you can download a bunch of apps
and they will work but the usability isn't there and usability is extremely
important check out Instagram if you look at Instagram
you kind of have to scroll through a single photo to see the entire photo
which is not ideal you should be able to see at least one full photo on your
screen at a time I don't think that's too much to ask and last but definitely
not least on this list of points is that this is a standalone device and while
that is true it is unfortunately true
it's unfortunate that they tried this shouldn't be a standalone device it has
SIM card slot that's great for Theory but I took the SIM card out of my cell
phone this is not a point I'm trying to make please note I know you can get like
a $5 Adder on your cell phone plans for most carriers to add a Sim card and
share your plan across so it's not a big deal but that meant that while I was
using both of these devices I found it actually considerably easier better and
more convenient to find somehow a free
Wi-Fi hotspot jump through all the Hoops to connect to it and then do what I was
trying to do on my phone instead of on this thing because doing it on this
thing was legitimately worse there was then other problems like battery life
filming this right now I charged this thing like 5 hours ago you can see the
battery in the top corner is in red not that long ago during this filming it
gave me the warning that it was below 14% battery life this is not an all day
device I didn't even use it that hard today I am a power user but I wasn't it
for that long so while it can be a standalone
device I wouldn't want it to be so
what's next for Neptune what's their future that would be the Neptune Duo and
the Neptune Hub the duo of which we mentioned earlier the inspiration behind
the Neptune Duo and Neptune Hub was the
idea that sometimes you know you might just want a bigger screen which makes
sense considering they probably used the pine for any amount of time at all
the way that they're going to do this is by having a screen with a battery behind
it that's it in the form factor of a cell phone and a tablet the idea would
be that your storage and your central compute would be on your wrist as your
watch and these devices would just be essentially battery banks for your watch
considering this thing died so fast that would probably be helpful and would
allow you to have a bigger screen for bigger applications they would even have
an HDMI dongle which would be able to do this to something like a TV or a monitor
so that you could could control everything on your watch on a bigger
screen an improvement that's very cool
in theory lonus and I have talked about this even on the W show way in the past
with nothing to do with the Neptune Pine what we were talking about was just a
Central Computing like disc or Puck that you might carry around in your pocket
which could do the compute and storage for all of your other devices an
interesting concept and I think wired summed it up pretty well about the
Neptune Hub they said a glimpse of what Computing should be in 202 5 and I can
see that and that's an interesting idea but for 2025 it's currently 2016 that's
a ways away and I'm into emerging Technologies as much as pretty much
anyone I know and this isn't for me it's so unusable and unwieldly that I don't
want it and that is unfortunately a
consistent problem their videos look awesome the hype is huge but
consistently the comments on their backers pages are depressing
syn we know this guy is a little dated but also thought that it still might be
applicable considering some people are still awaiting their shipments and
people are dealing with the aftershocks of their second crowdfunding campaign
still if you dislike the video dislike it if you like the video like it
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you want to see another video from us check Che got this video of another Kickstarter product it was actually kind
of interesting