When 19-year-old Canadian Simon Tian took to Kickstarter with the aim of designing and funding manufacture for a new Smartwatch, he took an approach that's the opposite of many Smartwatches today. Rather than starting with a basic timepiece and add features until physics or the budget got in the way, Simon started with a previous-generation smartphone and asked himself, "just how much of this can I shrink down to a watch-like size?" It might sound crazy, but considering that the Pine raised eight times its goal on Kickstarter, there's clearly a desire for this sort of hardware - and the final model was shown off at CES 2014 earlier today.
Now in all fairness, calling this new device - known as the Pine - a watch is a bit of a stretch, as it's much larger than your typical timepiece - for one thing, the 320x240 pixel-resolution TFT Screen is 2.4 inches wide. Imagine something the size of a deck of cards that's strapped along your wrist and you're almost there. As for the "phone" part of this weird hybrid, there's a micro-SIM card slot, speaker phone and forward- and rear-facing cameras. The forward camera is VGA quality and good enough for video calls, but you'll need to remove the device from your wrist to use the better-quality rear camera.
An example of that front camera in action (image courtesy DesignBoom)
The Pine comes equipped with a 1.2GHz Snapdragon S4 paired with 512MB RAM, which is half of the RAM of most smartphones today; but enough to play Rovio's plague of the smartphone era, Angry Birds, perfectly without any lag or jitter - and that's all anyone REALLY does with their smartphone, right? Because of the size of the display, it's entirely possible to use a full-size software keyboard, so you could theoretically also use this for emails and calls, but probably not very comfortably. In fact, it's hard to imagine this device being comfortable to wear for long periods at all, but there are always those who are prepared to sacrifice a little comfort in favour of having full smartphone functionality attached to their wrist. If you're one of them, the Pine is planned to hit stores in the US in March; and will be available in two flavours. The 16GB edition will cost $335 and the 32GB edition will set you back $395.
