The smartwatch world is crowded, but the ones at the top tower far above the rest of the competition. Few smartwatches released in the past several years have reached the level of success found by the Apple Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch, but the Spectra might just give them a run for their money.
The Spectra from Pocuter is a new player on the smartwatch scene that’s currently just starting its Kickstarter campaign. It has a retrofuturistic vibe that makes it feel like something from an early Bond film, but there’s a reason it has a thicker aluminum shell than most watches: it’s entirely user-repairable.
That’s right — at a time when every right to repair victory is cause for celebration, the Spectra promises a chance to access and repair your watch entirely on your own. It’s honestly quite impressive. The entire design of the smartwatch is centered around right-to-repair, so every component is easily accessible.
The craziest thing about it? There are only seven screws. Having seen what it takes to disassemble an Apple Watch, I will gladly take a handful of screws over the absurdly complicated breakdown the Apple Watch requires.
The Spectra doesn’t make sacrifices in terms of power, however. It has a lot of interesting components and features that you’d find on high-end smartwatches, including a 368 x 448 OLED display, an onboard speaker and microphone, and a crown on the side for adjustments.
The watch has 8MB of RAM and 32MB of executable flash memory. That might not sound like much, but it has a trick up its sleeve: a microSD card slot that expands the watch’s memory to an impressive 512GB.
Unfortunately, the smartwatch will not work with the Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store. According to its Kickstarter page, the team partnered with Moddable to develop SpectraOS, but it’s currently only about 50% complete.
The team will need time to populate the app store, but there’s a chance some apps could be transferred from the Pocuter One, Pocuter’s last successful project. According to the development progress timetable, the app store is 50% complete.
The Spectra sounds like a promising project, but it still has a ways to go. The Android and iOS apps are only 20% complete, the SDK is only 70% complete, and the app store and first-party app development still need more time in the oven.
As with any Kickstarter, contributing is a risk, but the Spectra is an exciting project that could encourage right-to-repair on a grander scale. If you’re interested, Spectra is available on its Kickstarter page for the early bird price of 199 euros ($217).
