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Whatever the gadget, battery life is ever the question – how long will it last? This is often thought of with our phones, but it’s ever more present with smart watches. In fact, I’m wearing one at the moment for a review, and I’m lucky to get two days between chargers (depending on what I’m doing with it). What if you could get around needing to charge the watch at all? That’s what the Sequent Supercharger is offering.
How is the Sequent Supercharger doing that, you might ask? Well, they took a page from the world of mechanical watches. Once upon a time, folks got tired of having to manually wind their watches every day or two to keep them running. So, the smart engineers of the time figured out reliable automatic winding, which takes the movement of your arm and hands and translates that – via a spinning rotor – into the winding of a mainspring. At least, that’s how it was done before. Here, the details are a little light, but there’s an “energy accumulator” which I’m assuming is a capacitor of some sort, that takes the kinetic energy from the rotor after it’s been converted to electrical energy.
Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taken as long as it has for this to hit a smartwatch. Now, as far as smartwatches go, the Sequent Supercharger feels very much like the items that Withings offers up – analog displays with basic activity / step tracking. To keep consumption down, it’s a “sync-on-demand” (presumably via Bluetooth Low Energy) when you press the crown, so there’s no notifications on your wrist. Somehow, they’re also claiming GPS tracking if you’re out for a run or hike (if you’re not connected to a phone, it needs it’s own GPS chip). On top of that, they’re also offering a version that has a heart-rate tracker built in, which is an interesting value add, that of course would require careful battery management as well.
All in all, the Sequent Supercharger is offering an interesting mix of past and future technology. At the time of writing this article, the campaign is over 600% funded, so it’s should be hitting. Early bird pricing starts at $181 for the sport version, $232 for the premium version, and then $252 for the HR-equipped version. It’s an interesting approach for sure (including some odd crypto-earning functions), though it does further fracture the tracking app market (as it has it’s own). Frankly, I’m really hoping that (a) this takes off and (b) we see more brands working on kinetic charging of smart watches. Oh, and (c), that it works better than those “shake to charge” flashlights ever did. campaign page or sequentworld.com
