Neptune Pine standalone Android smartwatch brings Snapdragon S4 on your wrist

The Neptune Pine surged past its $100 000 Kickstarter goal capturing backers’ sympathy and dollar with its promise to become the first truly standalone Android smartwatch with a large display. Yes, that means a full-on Snapdragon S4 dual-core chip, a camera, and texting and calling from your wrist.

We have already reported on it, but we're excited to see that an early prototype of the Neptune Pine has arrived at CES 2014, and - while at first you might find it funny how humongous it looks on the hand - your second thoughts would probably be about how awesome it is to have a full-fledged smartphone on your wrist. In contrast, most other smartwatches like the Pebble and Galaxy Gear only work fully when tethered to a smartphone.

The elephant in the room is size when we’re speaking about the Pine’s design. It looks huge on any hand, but we imagine it’d just appear disproportionately large on people with slimmer hands, and most girls included. It’s also too big to go unnoticed, so get ready to become the center of attention when someone notices you’re wearing this. If Google Glass wearers get a lot of attention, we imagine this would be even worse.

If you can deal with the large size, though, you get a reward in terms of features. The Pine comes with a 2.4-inch display with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels (it’s worn so that you’ll see it mostly in landscape mode), a 5-megapixel main rear-facing camera that you can use by detaching the smartphone piece out of the wristband and a 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 (Cortex A5-based) processor. The coolest feature is, of course, the presence of a microSIM card slot, so you can simply insert your SIM card in the Pine and use it like a regular smartphone. The device comes with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean on board, as well.

Since this is an Android-based device with a fairly large (for smartphone standards) display, its 810mAh battery really should last you around a day of use, so overnight charging seems like a must.

All in all, the Neptune Pine is clearly an experiment that will appeal to those craving a smartphone on their wrist (it literally looks like a miniature smartphone on a wristband!). If you are one of them, take a look at the Pine right below. You can also pre-order it for $335 by hitting the source link at the bottom.


source: Neptune Pine