Apple Watch Accessories Arrive, Focus on Battery Life
One of the biggest issues for wearables has been battery life—so much so that one of the Pebble Time’s biggest selling points despite its lack of a touchscreen is its 7-day battery life. So it’s not too surprising that accessories being released for the highest profile wearable yet, the Apple Watch, focus on what may be one of the device’s biggest weaknesses: its battery life.
The Wipowerband is a neon-colored Apple Watch case that slips between the device itself and your naked arm flesh. Because the Apple Watch juices up via inductive charging, the Wipowerband aims to offer a seamless way to add an extra day’s worth of power to your Apple Watch. Pre-ordering the Wipowerband doesn’t come cheap, though. The 42mm version is $99, while the 38mm iteration is only ten dollars less than that. That’s a bit pricey considering even the lowest price for the device itself—the Apple Watch Sport—is already $349.
But the Wipowerband is positively cheap when compared to another similar accessory: the Reserve Strap, which is available for pre-order at a whopping $249.99. For now, the Reserve Strap is still only a concept, but it seems to take advantage of the Apple Watch’s easily swapped band system. Instead of acting as a sort of extra cradle, like the Wipowerband, the Reserve Strap replaces the Apple Watch’s band entirely. As to whether or not that leads to better performance to justify that price isn’t yet clear, but it might look a little less strange.
While both accessories will hold off on launching until the Apple Watch actually ships in late April, they both speak to the ongoing problem with battery life for our everyday gadgets. What lengths will people go to in order to keep their devices powered up? Are accessories like these really the best way to go?
Hopefully companies like Apple and Google will find a way to solve the power problem in their devices in the first place, so we won’t have to buy goofy battery straps at such a steep cost.
[Wipowerband and Reserve Strap]