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Comment by oostevo | Hacker News Reader

I should preface this by saying that I know very little about batteries and consumer electronics, but a little about watches.

The problem of how to keep a mostly or completely analog watch wound throughout the day was solved a very long time ago. I wonder how feasible it would be to use something like the rotor weight from an automatic mechanical[1] or automatic quartz[2] watch as a trickle charger.

Would that just be too little added energy for the added complexity?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_watch [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_quartz

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It's about two orders of magnitude too little power for a smartwatch.

The problem isn't battery technology, the problem is the popular conception of what a "smartwatch" is.

Those automatic quartz watches seem to top out in the single digit microamp range.

Just spinning up a BTLE chip to receive a message takes far more than that (orders of magnitude), and without some sort of BT connection to your phone, the watch ceases to be smart.

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I'm not saying a Seiko mechanism is going to power any kind of smartdevice functions (although you might combo a tiny backup quartz mechanism so that when your smartwatch dies it can still tell time). What I am saying is that the problem with all these smartwatches getting shit battery life is just in their design. The Pebble, to it's credit, gets a more than adequate 4+ days of battery life because they were smart and used a microcontroller.

http://www.withings.com/activite/en-US This watch takes a different meaning of smartwatch, but it's closer to a year of battery life.

It’s not really a smartwatch (not that it matters). I do like the different approach and I think it’s very promising, but it’s still very specific in what it does. It’s an activity tracker plus watch. There is nothing wrong with that, but it’s also limited to just that. I would expect more from a smartwatch (but maybe no one needs a smartwatch anyone and this is a much more promising model for the future).

That website is unusable in FF on Windows.

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