 Welcome to Kick Farted. Kick Farted is a new series that we're gonna be doing based on crowdfunded projects through Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or whatever other platform that ship but don't exactly hit the mark. Episode 1 will be about the Neptune Pine. The Neptune Pine is a fully featured smartphone that goes on your wrist. Yeah. Intel brings DDR4 to the mainstream with their new Core i7 6700K and Core i5 6600K processors. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. The Neptune Pine Kickstarter was legendary. It made waves as a Canadian product. We're Canadians here at Linus Media Group and it was in the local news and stuff. This thing made over $800,000 on Kickstarter in the relatively early days and in Canada that's a big deal. Our population is less than the state of California so having a new company that does something like this is cool and a lot of people are excited. And so were the backers because they were making big claims. They're saying that smartwatches at the time were just notification engines and fitness trackers. They were saying that they weren't living up to the hype. They were saying that they wanted a fully fledged standalone device on your wrist and that was awesome and I was so hyped and it was sweet. They're even saying that you're gonna have full app support for everything you wanted. You're gonna be able to have video chats with the front facing camera and you can take high resolution HD videos and pictures the back facing camera. Awesome. So naturally we bought one. We backed the Kickstarter in November of 2013 with the intention of getting a unit. Linus specifically wanted to review it like we do here on Linus Tech Tips. But a problem which is not unique to this particular Kickstarter, it didn't exactly show up and naturally when working on many other things we forgot about it. Then we got an email about the Neptune Duo, a new fancy smartwatch from Neptune with enhanced features and all this new fun stuff. Slight problem, we didn't have the Neptune Pine yet. Linus emailed them. February 18th asked them what was up. What's going on guys? They responded shipping notification coming soon. Sorry for the inconvenience and you must not have seen the Kickstarter updates. Interesting. Wouldn't be too surprised. It's Linus. He gets tons of emails. He might not have seen it. I believed this fullheartedly at the beginning but then he showed me his inbox and he didn't receive any correspondence from them between July of 2014 and March of 2015. Linus responds within two minutes saying guys I don't want it anymore. Please cancel my shipments. Please give me a refund etc. At this point he doesn't really want the device anymore. It's been too long. No point in doing a real full formal review. He's over it. They don't respond for a long time. He sends a bunch of emails in the interim. Finally he's like hey guys I kind of can flex my muscles on social media and make this a lot worse for everybody. They respond saying yeah we informed our Kickstarter backers. There's no more refunds. Signing off. Team Neptune. Neptunepine.com is now dead. It's parked by some random website. It's been replaced by getneptune.com but when you Google Neptunepine having the first result be a parked website is kind of odd and the original repository is just kind of gone. The Kickstarter page isn't better. It hasn't received an update since August. There was shipping notifications apparently from May 2nd of 2014 to February 11th of 2015. That's a pretty big shipping window and apparently it wasn't even that successful because you go to the comment section it's just unfortunate. There's still an ocean of people that haven't received their shipments. At least we got ours eventually. So deliverability wise not great so far but Linus did decide to eventually do a review on it and even carried it around in his bag for about a month but just decided there was more important things to do and eventually shelved it anyways. We have now decided that it would be a perfect candidate for Kick Farted episode 1 so I guess now it's time to check it out. It's uncomfortable made with very stiff materials and things like the band that are very not forgiving. Has a lot of plastic construction. It's very large and unwieldy. I don't want to wear it all day. There's certain large watches that are very wearable all day. This thing is not in my opinion. The viewing angles of the screen are crap. Brandon took this nice photo of me but if you tilt it to the side you can see that it starts looking really bad and speaking of the nice photo the color depth murders it. The lighting is very smooth on the real photo. It doesn't look very smooth on this screen. Now we talked about the camera earlier on. If we switch Instagram to camera mode you'll see another problem. That's how that looks. That's how my phone makes it look. Which one would you choose? I'm gonna go with the phone basically every time but I guess let me know in the comments down below. You might have noticed too that I was running Instagram on here. You can't even do that off the start. Why? Because you don't have the Google Play Store. NeptuneNinja.com has a great guide on how to root this thing and then get the Play Store installed. It's really easy to follow. It's a great guide. Very good write-up. Good job Neptune Ninja. But let's admit that shouldn't have to exist and just because it's good doesn't mean it should. Okay okay crappy rhyme aside let's address the direct claims. They said that it had a high-resolution rear-facing camera. Okay let's benchmark it. There's a cool looking bomb over there that I built a computer in not that long ago. You can check out that video up here. Let's see how it did with that photo. Maybe we should retire the term high-resolution. I guess they're not technically incorrect here but come on guys that looks like crap and I don't want to post that anywhere let alone Instagram which is what I just took the photo with and it's almost dead. It's a 14% battery. Doesn't even make it through a f***ing work day. They also claimed that it's the only smartwatch that can video chat and while that's true they probably shouldn't want it to be true. You saw how bad the camera was earlier. They also said that it's compatible with tons of apps and yeah as we discussed earlier if you root the phone and force Google Play onto it you can download a bunch of apps and they will work but the usability isn't there and usability is extremely important. Check out Instagram. If you look at Instagram you kind of have to scroll through a single photo to see the entire photo which is not ideal. You should be able to see at least one full photo on your screen at a time. I don't think that's too much to ask. And last but definitely not least on this list of points is that this is a standalone device and while that is true it is unfortunately true. It's unfortunate that they tried. This shouldn't be a standalone device. It has a SIM card slot that's great for theory but I took the SIM card out of my cell phone. This is not a point I'm trying to make. Please note I know you can get like a $5 adder on your cell phone plans for most carriers to add a SIM card and share your plan across so it's not a big deal but that meant that while I was using both of these devices I found it actually considerably easier, better, and more convenient to find somehow a free Wi-Fi hotspot, jump through all the hoops to connect to it, and then do what I was trying to do on my phone instead of on this thing because doing it on this thing was legitimately worse. There was then other problems like battery life. Filming this right now I charged this thing like five hours ago. You can see the battery in the top corner is in red. Not that long ago during this filming it gave me the warning that it was below 14% battery life. This is not an all-day device. I didn't even use it that hard today. I am a power user but I wasn't on it for that long so while it can be a standalone device I wouldn't want it to be. So what's next for Neptune? What's their future? That would be the Neptune Duo and the Neptune Hub, the duo of which we mentioned earlier. The inspiration behind the Neptune Duo and Neptune Hub was the idea that sometimes you know you might just want a bigger screen which makes sense considering they probably used the Pine for any amount of time at all. The way that they're gonna do this is by having a screen with a battery behind it. That's it in the form factor of a cell phone and a tablet. The idea would be that your storage and your central compute would be on your wrist as your watch and these devices would just be essentially battery banks for your watch considering this thing died so fast that would probably be helpful and would allow you to have a bigger screen for bigger applications. They would even have an HDMI dongle which would be able to do this to something like a TV or a monitor so that you could control everything on your watch on a bigger screen. An improvement. That's very cool in theory. Linus and I have talked about this even on the WAN show way in the past with nothing to do with the Neptune Pine. What we were talking about was just a central computing like disk or puck that you might carry around in your pocket which could do the compute and storage for all of your other devices. An interesting concept and I think Wired summed it up pretty well about the Neptune Hub. They said a glimpse of what computing should be in 2025 and I can see that and that's an interesting idea but for 2025 it's currently 2016 that's a ways away and I'm into emerging technologies as much as pretty much anyone I know and this isn't for me. It's so unusable and unwieldy that I don't want it and that is unfortunately a consistent problem. Their videos look awesome, the hype is huge but consistently the comments on their backers pages are depressing. We know this guy's a little dated but also thought that it still might be applicable considering some people are still awaiting their shipments and people are dealing with the aftershocks of their second crowdfunding campaign still. If you dislike the video dislike it, if you like the video like it consider getting subscribed, consider supporting us through our affiliate codes and stuff like that. Buy an Amazon, buy a cool t-shirt from the description down below or becoming a contributor on the forum LinusTechTips.com. If you want to see another video from us check out this video of another Kickstarter product it was actually kind of interesting.