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This hybrid smartwatch has a 6-month battery life

BOLDR hybrid smartwatch startup from Singapore
BOLDR hybrid smartwatch startup from Singapore

“We like to call this a ‘clever watch,’” says Isa Ghani. This startup’s newest creation does do typical smartwatch stuff – like count your steps and relay notifications from your phone – but he calls it that because the watch, the Boldr Voyage, doesn’t have a digital screen, instead rocking traditional tick-tock hands and a physical watch-face.

Rather than throwing the kitchen sink at you (as Samsung usually does), or trying to hypnotize you into believing your existence will be hollow without it (hi, Apple), the startup team at Boldr Watches focused on a handful of features and nothing more.

“I don’t think we’re there with smartwatch technology yet,” Isa, who handles the startup’s marketing, adds. “When you look at them, you’re trying to read tiny messages and tiny pictures, and it’s just not as smart as you’d like it to be.” So there’s no digital screen on this hybrid smartwatch, but there are embedded LEDs and in-built vibration to alert you to certain notifications from your iPhone or Android device.

BOLDR hybrid smartwatch startup from Singapore
BOLDR hybrid smartwatch startup from Singapore

Isa Ghani, Leon Leong, and Travis Tan (L-R)

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Although that wasn’t done in pursuit of better battery life, it has resulted in the kind of battery range that regular smartwatches can only have electric dreams about – a claimed six months.

Leon Leong, the startup’s co-founder, points out that it has two batteries – one for the smart bits, as well as one that lasts three years for the Quartz movement. If you wish, you can turn off the Voyage’s clever bits so that it’s just a regular watch.

The Boldr Voyage is now crowdfunding on Kickstarter. It costs US$129 at pre-order price, which is fifty bucks off the regular retail price once it hits stores. The watch should ship in April 2016.

New watch brand

This new watch is the first smartwatch – I mean “clever watch” – from the Singapore-based startup, but it’s not the team’s first product or crowdfunding project.

BOLDR hybrid smartwatch startup from Singapore
BOLDR hybrid smartwatch startup from Singapore

The Boldr Voyage comes in a choice of colors that Kickstarter buyers can select closer to the April 2016 shipping date.

At the start of the year, the founding duo of Leon and Travis Tan (Isa joined recently to do marketing) took the purely mechanical watch they created onto Kickstarter and hit the CA$50,000 (US$37,700) goal they set. That was under the Brangelina-esque TravisLeon name. The team is going to keep the two brands running in parallel – TravisLeon for analog watches, and Boldr for hybrid smartwatches.

The plan is to launch a new model under each brand every year, sticking with the fast-paced annual product cycle that’s now the norm for smartphones and wearables.

Isa says the aim with Boldr is to make hybrid watches that are affordable and sit “in a very nice sweet spot” between smart and conventional watches – and which balance being a lifestyle brand and a device for getting things done. What the team doesn’t want is something that’s “distracting you or hindering you throughout your day.”

But the hybrid smartwatch might distract you with its heft. Some people say the Apple Watch is a bit thick at 11.5 mm, but the Voyage is 14.5 mm thick.

Funded

Travis and Leon, both Singaporeans, are childhood friends. They worked on a company together before and then went their separate ways in 2008. It wasn’t until 2014 that they ran into each other again, Leon tells Tech in Asia. That was when Travis started talking enthusiastically about watches. “He shared with me about the beauty of mechanical watches and I got fascinated,” says Leon.

BOLDR hybrid smartwatch startup from Singapore
BOLDR hybrid smartwatch startup from Singapore

Soon they were ready to hit Kickstarter with that watch. “We successfully got funded on the very last day – and we were very happy about it.” In a close call, the project was just US$230 above its target. Last week, that first product began shipping to its early crowdfunders.

The team, which is now three people along with Isa, won’t have to go through the harrowing experience again – the Boldr Voyage shot past its modest CA$30,000 (US$22,600) funding goal soon after it was put online. It’s now up to US$45,000 already.

The next step for the hardware startup is to turn two successful Kickstarters into a brand. “We’re trying to build a lifestyle brand,” says Isa – and that means not just watches. They have some ideas what gadget could be next, but for now they’re keeping the plans in the same place as their hybrid smartwatches – up their sleeves.

This post This hybrid smartwatch has a 6-month battery life appeared first on Tech in Asia.