Neptune Computer, invented by
19-year-old Simon Tian, has raised more than CA$250,000 since initiation a
33-day Kickstarter campaign for its Neptune Pine smartwatch
on Monday with a target of $100,000.
The smartwatch enabled 2G, 3G,
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, GPS and Bluetooth 4.0. It works on all flatforms of versions
of Android Jelly Bean 4.1.2, and it has a 2.4-inch QVGA capacity
works touchscreen mode.
The Neptune Pine is predefined
built a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor.
It supports quad-band
GSM/GPRS/EDGE and quad-band UMTS/HSPA+/WCDMA so phone lovers can make and
receive phone calls and send SMS messages on most wireless carriers worldwide.
It has a full QWERTY keyboard and many features are enabled in this computer.
Its battery backup is good for
eight hours of talk time, seven hours of net surfing, or 10 hours of music listening,
and will last up to five days on standby and excelent feartures.
This model has been a built-in speaker and mike and supports 48
languages and some of the languages are enabled feature.
The Pine will be available in
16-GB and 32-GB models.
More Pine Features
Both the front- and back-facing
cams have LED flash.
The front-facing VGA camera's
LED doubles as a heart-rate monitor and enables video chat. The rear-facing
5-MP camera capchuring still images and HD video.
The Pine has a built-in
accelerometer, gyroscope, pedometer and digital compass. It supports a variety
of fitness apps.
It has a micro-SIM card slot.
Sweet Dreams Are Made of
These
The first prototypes have
already been produced, and all parts of the design and engineering phase have
been finalized, according to Neptune as soon as possible released date is
annonced date earlier.
Production tooling and
engineering validation testing have begun, with mass manufacturing scheduled to
begin in early December.
Neptune needs funds to order
bill of materials components, to pass worldwide certifications for wireless
devices, to bring up the Pine to the IP67 rating, to make it dust-proof and
water-resistant, and to meet surface mount technology production and assembly costs.
Some Possible Issues
"Just because you can put
in everything doesn't mean you should," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at
the Enderle Group,
told TechNewsWorld.
"What makes the Qualcomm Toq stand
out is it wasn't designed to do everything," he continued.
The screen size could be a
problem, Maribel Lopez, principal analyst at Lopez Research,
told TechNewsWorld.
"A 2.4-inch QWERTY
keyboard? Really?" she asked. "People complain about keyboards on
5-inch phone screens being too small."
Smartwatches launched earlier
this year by Sony and Samsung have not taken the market by storm. Sony has not
disclosed sales figures, and while Samsung claimed healthy Galaxy Gear sales since its Sept. 25 release, the
800,000 figure it reported earlier this week may relate only to the total
number shipped -- not actually purchased by consumers.
Other estimates have suggested
the Galaxy Gear's sales have been weak -- more in the neighborhood of 50,000.
A Mystery in the Making
Neptune had received nearly 6,000
reservations for the
Pine smartwatch by February, Tian claimed, even before the specs and design
were finalized, according to a CNET report.
It's not clear why a nascent
device would get such support.
Further, results on Neptune's
Kickstarter page don't quite add up. A check at 1:44 p.m. on Thursday showed
828 backers had pledged a total of $205,827. However, the number of backers at
each pledge level added up to a total of 758.
A check at 7:12 p.m. on
Thursday showed 877 backers had donated $220,740, but based on the numbers
shown for each pledge level, the total came to 800.
Then there's the question of
how a supposed teenaged college dropout could work for a whole year with eight
others to develop the Neptune Pine without receiving any funding.
