They are using a generic watch manufactured by some Chinese company, which means almost visually identical watches already exist on the market. They value they are adding are the custom operating system, apps and connectivity.
EDIT: I encourage anyone to comment.
That's not to mention the fact that the ONLY stretch goals are about making more apps for the watch. If you're serious about building a smartwatch you better offer people a damn good reason to buy it, not sit on your ass waiting for people to pay you to make the thing useful.
They make claims to be the hardware developer, with lots of pictures of circuitry and apparent prototyping.
It smells like a scam.
This could be going on here with the Z3 watch. Instead, we have an out of control witchhunt. I think it makes a lot more financial sense to modify a proven design than to start from scratch. If you're on kick starter, you probably don't have deep pockets and an engineering department to begin with. Not to mention that hardware is kinda a commodity now. Good software is the hard nut to crack. Think CM vs Touchwiz on the same phone.
Right, except in this case the guy claims never to have heard of it and to be making stuff from scratch, has lots of pictures of prototyping and implies it was all developed in-house, spammed his own comments section repeatedly for hours and hours with a bunch of non-answers to questions people had raised then claimed he'd been hacked and that wasn't him (but still didn't answer any questions)...
Basically acting very shady. I sure as hell wouldn't be giving him any money.
It appears that the PCB is even the same one as in the other watch.
I'd have no issue whatsoever with a KS that said "we found a pretty cool watch and we want to make it more awesome with some hardware tweaks and our own ultra-cool software stack!" But that doesn't seem to be what's happening here.
>> maybe he was hacked( internet can become very vengeful for almost no reason )and that person/competitor succeeded discrediting the project.
It's certainly possible, though it seems that the communication in the repeatedly spammed (and then denied) message was similar in style and content to the guy's previous comms and even if you ignore that he hasn't given any answers to his backers' questions.
That is pretty misleading. I will set this to remind me in march or so and we will see the resolution( in case it's backed ).