Wrist Mounted Smartphone - A BAD Idea - KICKFARTED ep1
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
2,040 words · ~10 min read
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welcome to kickfarted kickfarted is a
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new series that we're going to be doing based on crowdfunded projects through
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Kickstarter Indiegogo or whatever other platform that ship but don't exactly hit
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the mark episode one will be about the Neptune Pine the Neptune Pine is a fully
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featured smartphone that goes on your wrist yeah
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Intel brings ddr4 to the mainstream with their new core
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i76700k and core i56600k processors
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check out the link in the video description to learn more the Neptune Pine Kickstarter was
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legendary it made waves as a Canadian product we're Canadians here at lonus
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Media Group and it was in the local news and stuff this thing made over $800,000
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on Kickstarter in the relatively early days and in Canada that's a big deal our
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population is less than the state of Cali California so having a new company
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that does something like this is cool and a lot of people were excited and so
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were the backers because they were making big claims they were saying that
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SmartWatches at the time were just notification engines and fitness
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trackers they were saying that they weren't living up to the hype they were
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saying that they wanted a fully fledged Standalone device on your wrist and that
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was awesome and I was so hyped and it was sweet they're even saying that
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you're going to have full app support for everything that you wanted you're
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going to be able to have video chats with a front- faing camera and you can take high resolution HD videos and
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pictures the back facing camera awesome so naturally we bought one we backed the
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kickstarter in November of 2013 with the intention of getting a unit lonus
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specifically wanted to review it like we do here on lonus Tech tips but a problem
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which is not unique to this particular Kickstarter it didn't exactly show up
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and naturally when working on many other things we forgot about it then we got an
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email about the Neptune Duo a new fancy smartwatch from Neptune with enhanced
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features and all this new fun stuff slight problem we didn't have the
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Neptune Pine yet lonus emailed them February 18th asked them what was up
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what's going on guys they responded shipping notification coming soon sorry
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for the inconvenience and you must not have seen the kickstarter updates
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interesting wouldn't be too surprised it's lonus he gets tons of emails he
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might not have seen it I believed this full-heartedly at the beginning but then
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he showed me his inbox and he didn't receive any correspondence from them
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between July of 2014 and March of 2015 lonus responds within
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2 minutes saying guys I don't want it anymore please cancel my shipment please
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give me a refund Etc at this point he doesn't really want the device anymore
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it's been too long no point doing a real full formal review he's over it they
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don't respond for a long time he sends a bunch of emails in the interim finally
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he's like hey guys I kind of can Flex my muscles on social media and make this a
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lot worse for everybody they respond saying yeah we informed our Kickstarter
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backers there's no more refunds signing off team Neptune neptun pin.com is now
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dead it's parked by some random website it's been replaced by get neptune.com
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but when you Google Neptune Pine having the first result be a parked website is
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kind of odd and the original repository is just kind of gone the kickstarter
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page isn't better it hasn't received an update since August there was shipping
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notifications apparently from May 2nd of 2014 to February 11th of 2015 that's a
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pretty big shipping window and apparently it wasn't even that successful because if you go to the
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comment section it's just unfortunate
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there's still an ocean of people that haven't received their shipments at
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least we got ours eventually so deliverability wise not great so far but
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lonus did decide to eventually do a review on it and even carried it around
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in his bag for about a month but just decided there was more important things
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to do and eventually sheld it anyways we have now decided that it would be a
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perfect candidate for kickfarted episode 1 so I guess now it's time to check it
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out it's uncomfortable made with very stiff materials and things like the band
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that are very not forgiving has a lot of
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plastic construction it's very large and unwieldly I don't want to wear it all
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day there's certain large watches that are very wearable all day this thing is
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not in my opinion the viewing angles of the screen are crap Brandon took this
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nice photo of me but if you tilt it to the side you can see that it starts
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looking really bad and speaking of the nice photo the color depth murders it
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the lighting is very smooth on the real photo it doesn't look very smooth on this screen now we talked about the
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camera earlier on if we switch Instagram to camera mode you'll see another
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problem that's how that looks that's how my phone makes it look which one would
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you choose I'm going to go with the phone basically every time but I guess
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let me know in the comments down below you might have noticed too that I was
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running in Instagram on here you can't even do that off the start why because
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you don't have the Google Play store neptun ninja.com has a great guide on
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how to root this thing and then get the play store installed it's really easy to
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follow it's a great guide very good write up good job Neptune ninja but
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let's admit that shouldn't have to exist
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and just because it's good doesn't mean it should okay okay crappy rhyme aside
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let's address their direct claims they said that it had a high resolution
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rear-facing camera okay let's Benchmark it there's a cool looking bomb over
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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
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that photo maybe we should retire the
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term high resolution I guess they're not technically incorrect here but come on
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guys that looks like crap and I don't want to post that anywhere let alone
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Instagram which is what I just took the photo with and it's almost
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dead a 14% back battery doesn't even
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make it through a workday they also claimed that it's the
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only Smartwatch that can video chat and while that's true they probably
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shouldn't want it to be true you saw how bad the camera was earlier they also
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said that it's compatible with tons of apps and yeah as we discussed earlier if
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you root the phone and force Google Play onto it you can download a bunch of apps
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and they will work but the usability isn't there and usability is extremely
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important check out Instagram if you look at Instagram
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you kind of have to scroll through a single photo to see the entire photo
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which is not ideal you should be able to see at least one full photo on your
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screen at a time I don't think that's too much to ask and last but definitely
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not least on this list of points is that this is a standalone device and while
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that is true it is unfortunately true
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it's unfortunate that they tried this shouldn't be a standalone device it has
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SIM card slot that's great for Theory but I took the SIM card out of my cell
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phone this is not a point I'm trying to make please note I know you can get like
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a $5 Adder on your cell phone plans for most carriers to add a Sim card and
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share your plan across so it's not a big deal but that meant that while I was
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using both of these devices I found it actually considerably easier better and
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more convenient to find somehow a free
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Wi-Fi hotspot jump through all the Hoops to connect to it and then do what I was
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trying to do on my phone instead of on this thing because doing it on this
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thing was legitimately worse there was then other problems like battery life
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filming this right now I charged this thing like 5 hours ago you can see the
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battery in the top corner is in red not that long ago during this filming it
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gave me the warning that it was below 14% battery life this is not an all day
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device I didn't even use it that hard today I am a power user but I wasn't it
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for that long so while it can be a standalone
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device I wouldn't want it to be so
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what's next for Neptune what's their future that would be the Neptune Duo and
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the Neptune Hub the duo of which we mentioned earlier the inspiration behind
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the Neptune Duo and Neptune Hub was the
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idea that sometimes you know you might just want a bigger screen which makes
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sense considering they probably used the pine for any amount of time at all
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the way that they're going to do this is by having a screen with a battery behind
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it that's it in the form factor of a cell phone and a tablet the idea would
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be that your storage and your central compute would be on your wrist as your
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watch and these devices would just be essentially battery banks for your watch
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considering this thing died so fast that would probably be helpful and would
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allow you to have a bigger screen for bigger applications they would even have
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an HDMI dongle which would be able to do this to something like a TV or a monitor
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so that you could could control everything on your watch on a bigger
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screen an improvement that's very cool
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in theory lonus and I have talked about this even on the W show way in the past
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with nothing to do with the Neptune Pine what we were talking about was just a
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Central Computing like disc or Puck that you might carry around in your pocket
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which could do the compute and storage for all of your other devices an
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interesting concept and I think wired summed it up pretty well about the
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Neptune Hub they said a glimpse of what Computing should be in 202 5 and I can
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see that and that's an interesting idea but for 2025 it's currently 2016 that's
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a ways away and I'm into emerging Technologies as much as pretty much
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anyone I know and this isn't for me it's so unusable and unwieldly that I don't
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want it and that is unfortunately a
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consistent problem their videos look awesome the hype is huge but
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consistently the comments on their backers pages are depressing
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syn we know this guy is a little dated but also thought that it still might be
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applicable considering some people are still awaiting their shipments and
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people are dealing with the aftershocks of their second crowdfunding campaign
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still if you dislike the video dislike it if you like the video like it
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consider getting subscribed consider supporting us through our affiliate
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description down below or becoming a contributor on the Forum Lin tips.com if
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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
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