Battered but not beaten, Kairos has a second crack at building up its smartwatch brand

Second time lucky, perhaps? Kairos, the South Korean startup that promised an amazing Swiss hybrid smartwatch but has not yet delivered, is now back with a new model that’s very different.

Whereas the original Kairos model was a mechanical watch with a semi-opaque screen for smart notifications from your phone, the new Kairos T-band is a smart strap with a curved LED screen that can be attached to any existing analog watch. So your Swatch or your Rolex can be turned into a smartwatch.

The T-band is now crowdfunding on Indiegogo where the startup is hoping to raise US$50,000. The T-band, which comes with a Kairos Swiss watch face, costs from US$199, though cheaper variations are available for those who want a pure analog watch – or you could just buy the smart strap itself.

Kairos founder Sam Yang insists that this is not an admission of failure with its first watch. “Our hybrid watch project is not canceled nor is it pushed back due to the T-band. The biggest misconception we are getting is that we abandoned that project, therefore we scammed people, or that we lost focus,” he explains to Tech in Asia. Yang adds:

In fact, we launched the T-band more for our pre-order customers than anyone. We had about 15 percent of our customers who fell in love with our designs and asked if we can just sell the analog watch because the transparent display had only 40 percent transparency [so] it was blocking out the design too much for them. For some they don’t mind and want the cool factor of a transparent display. However, in order to provide more options for everyone, we came up with the T-band and launched prior to shipping the hybrid models so that our hybrid pre-order customers can choose before we make and ship their products.
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So the original will eventually come out, but there’s no shipping date yet. The hybrid watch attracted US$1.4 million in pre-orders, so a lot of people are left waiting.

This is the new T-band in close-up: