Wristwatches built with the same E Ink screen Amazon uses in its Kindles has caused a real stir at CES this year.
One such design was the Pebble watch, which raised $10 million (£6 million) in funding on Kickstarter, making it the site's most successful crowdfunded project so far. Alongside the Pebble at CES was Central Standard Timing's CST-01 timepiece, which claims to be the "world's thinnest watch".
Both watches use E Ink technology and both have been funded on Kickstarter. At the time Wired.co.uk met Dave Vondle, Central Standard Timing's CEO, his company's CST-01 watch had achieved $30,000 (£18,500) of its $200,000 (£124,000) target. At the time of writing -- two days later -- it has exceeded its target, sitting with just under $250,000 (£155,000) of funding.
In person, the CST-01 is indeed remarkably thin at just under a single millimetre thick, and enjoys an elegant flexible stainless steel design that embodies a futuristic aesthetic similar to the Tokyoflash binary watch.
The flexibility of the watch is aided by recent advancements in E Ink displays, which have been used not only by Amazon Kindles in recent years, but also Sony's ebook readers and more besides.
Vondle explained the CST-01 watch has been one year in the making, and was evidently elated by the Kickstarter community's response to his company's design when Wired.co.uk met him at CES.
It is estimated to begin shipping in the second half of 2013.
Between Central Standard Timing's device as well as the Pebble watch, it's clear that there's a real hunger for watches that utilise monochrome E Ink. But with E Ink Holdings, which spun out of MIT's Media Lab in the late 1990s, already hard at work producing colour versions of its monochrome displays, one can only wonder if CES 2014 will be full of colourful E Ink wristwatches vying for our attention -- and funding.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
