This hybrid smartwatch has a 6-month battery life

“We like to call this a ‘clever watch,’” says Isa Ghani. This startup’s newest creation does do typical smartwatch stuff – like count your steps and relay notifications from your phone – but he calls it that because the watch, the Boldr Voyage, doesn’t have a digital screen, instead rocking traditional tick-tock hands and a physical watch-face.

Rather than throwing the kitchen sink at you (as Samsung usually does), or trying to hypnotize you into believing your existence will be hollow without it (hi, Apple), the startup team at Boldr Watches focused on a handful of features and nothing more.

“I don’t think we’re there with smartwatch technology yet,” Isa, who handles the startup’s marketing, adds. “When you look at them, you’re trying to read tiny messages and tiny pictures, and it’s just not as smart as you’d like it to be.” So there’s no digital screen on this hybrid smartwatch, but there are embedded LEDs and in-built vibration to alert you to certain notifications from your iPhone or Android device.

Isa Ghani, Leon Leong, and Travis Tan (L-R)

Although that wasn’t done in pursuit of better battery life, it has resulted in the kind of battery range that regular smartwatches can only have electric dreams about – a claimed six months.

Leon Leong, the startup’s co-founder, points out that it has two batteries – one for the smart bits, as well as one that lasts three years for the Quartz movement. If you wish, you can turn off the Voyage’s clever bits so that it’s just a regular watch.

The Boldr Voyage is now crowdfunding on Kickstarter. It costs US$129 at pre-order price, which is fifty bucks off the regular retail price once it hits stores. The watch should ship in April 2016.

New watch brand

This new watch is the first smartwatch – I mean “clever watch” – from the Singapore-based startup, but it’s not the team’s first product or crowdfunding project.

The Boldr Voyage comes in a choice of colors that Kickstarter buyers can select closer to the April 2016 shipping date.

At the start of the year, the founding duo of Leon and Travis Tan (Isa joined recently to do marketing) took the purely mechanical watch they created onto Kickstarter and hit the CA$50,000 (US$37,700) goal they set. That was under the Brangelina-esque TravisLeon name. The team is going to keep the two brands running in parallel – TravisLeon for analog watches, and Boldr for hybrid smartwatches.

The plan is to launch a new model under each brand every year, sticking with the fast-paced annual product cycle that’s now the norm for smartphones and wearables.

Funded