Thoughts on CST
If you have been following the Central Standard Time kickstarter, you will know that founders Dave Vondle and Jerry O’Leary have sought to build the “world’s thinnest watch”.
Last night, the CST team sent a backer update announcing that they will not be able to fulfill the campaign any further and are now looking at partial refunding and open-sourcing options. I was one of the lucky few to get a unit before this meltdown and I wanted to share my thoughts on what I think one of the best and most beautiful electronic timepieces I own.
Before I get started, I wanted to say that I am definitely a technology enthusiast. So you should remember this bias when reading the following. Some of my friends at MIT have even developed an approach whereby they come to visit me periodically just to see what latest gadget I’m working with or evaluating. I became interested in wearable technologies mostly in an effort to try and improve the user interface to the biological laboratory and biomedical research workflow.
CST-01
The now defunct CST-01 was perfect for me. The design of the watch is extremely stylish and the week-long battery life is great.
The display is a segmented eINK display making for optimal readability in all lighting conditions while minimizing battery usage since you don’t have to refresh hundreds or thousands of pixels but only a few segments.
However, my experience was not all perfect and the major issue of the CST01 is its fragility. The thinness of the device turned out to be both its major asset and weakness.
On one hand, the incredibly small thickness is fabulous when wearing collared shirts as it doesn’t bunch up the wrist cuff like all watches before it do. Instead, it slides seamlessly under the shirt and makes checking the time extremely easy.
On the other, I have gotten two different units of the watch and within weeks both were broken and not able to tell time when unplugged. The first unit actually came dead on arrival, but the guys at CST were amazing and sent me another one. My understanding, based on a couple of emails with the founders, is that the battery management chip is very fragile due to the special packaging required to be embeddable at this thickness. Reading through the clear -and frankly great- backer updates, it seems that this fragility largely contributed to the low yield and subsequent issues with the units.
Another small problem I noticed is that the all-metal band of the watch caused me to sweat underneath in the summer weather. This is a minimal issue that I fixed by putting a strip of adhesively-backed fabric on the wrist-facing part. Future versions can easily add this, or can even be added by the user after the fact as I did.
Finally, the time is set by using the buttons on the base station. In itself, that is not a problem and is an ok trade-off for having the world’s thinnest watch. However, the buttons on the base are a little “sticky” and feel annoying to press as they don’t provide good physical feedback of their state. It also takes too much time to set the time and the time “jumps” are very unintuitive. Also, don’t forget to set your watch ahead if you’re going to be traveling to another timezone like I did. But all of these are easily fixed problems either in firmware or by redesigning the base buttons.
Conclusions
While my experience hit a few snags, I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed this watch. It was simple, beautifully designed and elegant. I am sad to see that CST and Flextronics could not find a way to fulfill the entire campaign. This is the best electronic watch I have ever owned and I am sad to see the grim prospects for its future development.
In particular, I think the current outlook seems negative for both parties, making Flextronics look bad for their strong-arming of a small, innovative company while CST was not able to go all the way through with its plan and distribute its first watch.
For my part, I know I will support any future efforts Dave and Jerry will put in this project or variation thereof. Maybe a CST-02 with slightly thicker specs would still be beautiful and functional and increase the reliability of the final product. I am also looking forward to the team open-sourcing its design and specs, as I am tempted to design a little portable battery that will sidestep the problems with my currently faulty unit.
But at the end of the day, kickstarter is about taking some risk, and for what I have seen of the CST team and product, I could not be happier to have been [a small] part of it. Now I just hope that magically, CST and flextronics find a way to resume work to produce this really beautiful and innovative product. In the meantime, I will use my CST as a desktop watch :)
