You have probably heard about E Ink before. It is the new technology that is being used in portable book reading platforms such as the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle. Thanks to Phosphor for sending in a E Ink watch for us to review, even though there are many devices that are using E Ink, Phosphor is the first company to use in a watch.
We were sent a watch named Digital Hour, it came with the leather band option although the watch can also be ordered with a plastic or a metal band. The presentation of the watch is very good starting with the luxurious box, it has a texture something like leather, I would not be surprised if the intent was to house the watch in the box at night. The feel of the watch is good, the band is flexible and the body of the watch has a nice weight to it and does not feel fragile.
The time mode shown below is interesting and would prevent people peeking at your watch to see the time. It is very simple to read when you know what you are looking for. The missing slot in the hour circle represents the current hour. The settings on the watch are simple since there are only two buttons to deal with. I like that you can change the background color to be black or white, it makes a dramatic change to the look of the watch depending on which one you choose.
I wore this watch for two solid weeks and didn’t take it off for anything, the screen held up and didn’t get any scratches on it, the band also held up well and did not get any scuffs. I didn’t use the watch underwater but it is water resistant up to 50 meters.
A few things that may be deal breakers for you is the fact that there is no stop watch feature and no light for night viewing. I found it a bit cumbersome the few times that I needed to look at the time when it was dark. I am not sure how consistent the display quality is since the review unit has a small black spec in it. Is this a small group of black balls that refuse to drop down? I am not sure but it does appear to be a tiny black mark on the actual display itself.
The price may seem a bit high but is comparable to other exotic watches. If you are looking for a cool Christmas gift this might be for you if you like cool looking watches. You can also win one of these watches by entering the contest that they have running right now.
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Thanks for the review Alan, what a fantastic watch! I’d wager you’re reluctant to hand it back to them. 😉
I’m seriously thinking of buying one from one of their UK suppliers right now!
One qualm I have though, its a problem I see on many many watches, not only state-of-the-art E-Ink watches, that the software is a bit strange – look on their website, they do a very similar E-Ink watch which shows a full calendar on the screen, as opposed to just the date and year.
Now why couldn’t they have just built the full calendar into one of the modes on the watch you reviewed!?
Secondly, I would have liked a little more variation in the watch display, maybe the time and date on one screen with colons separating time digits and slashes / separating date digits, or how about two of those cool dials to represent hour and minutes? You could still leave in the existing display types and just switch between lots of different display modes.
I understand though that E-Ink displays are very slow, so a seconds indicator is unfeasible, battery life would suffer a lot. Furthermore this rules out a stopwatch, or timer, or other similar functions.
It raises interesting questions about how you design an E-Ink devices in general – if you had a good enough processor in it, could it drive the display totally dynamically to display anything you want, like in the Amazon Kindle? Or, in the case for very low powered devices like watches, do you have to carefuly segregate various areas of the display and drive the display to only switch on/off (actually toggle between white and black) some of those areas to make up the picture, similar to how an LCD watch works?
I own one of those motorola E-Ink phones, the F3, and that too sees to show LCD like behaviour, whereby only certain areas are toggle-able between black and white, but the whole display can be inverted. The F3 text seems to look a lot like a seven segment LED display, only in E-Ink.
If even low powered procs can drive every pixel (dot?) independently, it makes me wonder why designers aren’t a lot more inventive with E-Ink devices below E-Readers, they could make something very dynamic looking with a little bit of procedural code – progress bars spring to mind.
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Oh by the way they’re not the first company to use E-Ink tech in a watch, someone else did first, although it did go to market, it was certainly a very premium, expensive, and quite rare item –
http://www.wristdreams.com/archives/2007/04/seiko_electroni.html
This is the ladies design.
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Hi Stu,
Thanks for the info! Let us know how you like the watch if you get it.
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Hi Alan,
What a neat looking watch!
The band will be made of two strips of leather and the orange edge will be there to stop the leather from coming apart. Otherwise, the inside surface of the band would be suede.
I had one of the Motorola e-ink phones (horrible, horrible thing) and I found that the display began to show black dots after a very little use – I assume that the black spheres become ‘stuck’ in the upper layer and fail to sink when the current is applied. I also found with the phone display, segments that were black for long periods of time would take longer to fade than segments that had only been black for a short time. Oh, did I mention that it was a horrible phone??
Thanks for the review! I wonder what Ashens review would be like 😉
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Hi Krusty,
That makes sense about the leather. I was sure it was but I had just never seen leather with a colored edge before. I guess there are good and bad implementations of e-ink, I have heard good things about the Kindle screen and this watch screen is also quite good. I wonder if there are a few methods of manufacturing the screens and Motorola has selected an inferior process?
Did the cell phone have a backlight?
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Hi Alan,
The phone was *very* cheap! No backlight – in reality, it barely functioned as a phone! The screen was very low res and looked very grainy, unlike the watch that looks amazingly crisp and sharp. There’s a wikipedia page on the phone Here
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Why isn’t it possible to make a watch with e-ink-arms instead of mechanical ones? Seiko made a mechanic watch with e-ink-background. That is even not very usefull. Please look: http://www.allercappella.de/CasioAE12.htm ! The world doesn’t need digital watches!