Why Another Smart Watch?

What Are Smart Watches?

We’ve been hearing about Smart Watches for a while now. It’s the hot new thing! These miniaturized computers on your wrist can do much more than ordinary watches. They can seamlessly integrate with your Smart Phone with wireless connectivity and show you messages you receive, remind you of your daily tasks, show you who’s calling when your phone is tucked away, but many have more advanced features such as the ability to pick up calls and talk through your watch, monitor your daily activity levels and calories burned to help you stay healthy, and some go as far as providing all the functionality of a Smart Phone on your wrist.

The Smart Watch Problem

Unfortunately, fitting all these cool features into a tiny device that fits comfortably on your wrist is a major technical challenge. As a result, Smart Watches are typically large, thick and suffer from very short battery life compared to an ordinary watch. A century ago, wrist watches were mechanical watches that had to be wound by hand every day to keep them running. This was overcome by the invention of automatic watches, which wind themselves from the movement of your hands, and quartz watches are capable of running for years from a tiny coin cell battery. The problem is that Smart Watches give us more hassle than even a 100-year-old hand-wound watch, which required only a few finger movements a day to “charge” that could be done anywhere, whereas charging a Smart Watch is an hour-long process that also requires you to have access to a power point and your charging cable. Is that really the best you can do with today’s technology? We did not think so! And that is why we started developing the Lune Smart Watch.

The Solution

If companies like Samsung and Apple are still shipping Smart Watches with 1-2 days battery life, how could a startup company from New Zealand do better? Surely those big corporations can afford the very best engineers? However when you look at the Smart Watches from those companies, inside they are very much like Smart Phones scaled down to fit on your wrist. They have power-hungry dual-core processors and back-lit displays, yet 95% of the time they just sit there on your wrist doing nothing more than any ordinary watch would. Realizing this, we were able to come up with a Smart Watch design that uses as little power as an ordinary digital watch most of the time, and only using more power occasionally, when accessing Smart functionality, resulting in much longer battery life than current Smart Watches.