Neptune Suite shows a taste of what computing should be in 2025!

MONTREAL, Quebec, Canada (PNN) - March 16, 2015 - When Neptune launched its grand idea for upending the smart phone ecosystem, many responses boiled down to: Huh?

Sure, the idea sounded downright radical: Instead of a smart phone streaming to devices like a smart watch, the Neptune Hub and Pocket were created with the opposite relationship in mind. There was Hub, a smart watch powerful enough to run apps, take calls, and send messages; and there was Pocket, a relatively dumb screen that fit in your pocket, like a smart phone, but was little more than an input device. Many people didn’t get it. “Most of the negativity was from people that don’t see this as a first start,” says Simon Tian, Neptune’s 20-year-old founder. “They thought we were just going to stop at the pocket screen.”

It isn’t. Today, Neptune launches what it calls Suite, a group of devices to augment Hub. There’s the Tab, a tablet with an attachable keyboard. There’s also a dongle that will stream to your TV, and wireless ear buds you can wear around your neck, and which cleverly doubles as a charging cord. It’s all selling for the price originally announced for the Hub and Pocket: $899 at retail, or a couple hundred less if you pre-order via Neptiune’s Indiegogo campaign.

Working with industrial design firm Pearl, Neptune already has done much of the industrial design and component planning required to start intensive tooling and testing. Moreover, Neptune has now revealed that the core technology making it all work is something called WiGig, a new wireless protocol that allows streaming from the Hub to the other devices at up to 7GB per second - which Neptune claims creates latency too small to notice.

Now, it’s just a matter of funding and proving that there’s a market for such a novel experiment in computing.

This is the beginning of a whole new computing era. Imagine a world where devices are so commoditized that they’re just part of the environment. They can be everywhere; in your home, at the office, in your car, in restaurants, shopping malls, schools. Need a screen? Simply find one and use it as yours.

Devices are also a lot easier to design and produce, enabling product designers and manufacturers to potentially create an infinite variety of devices. Screens can be embedded into household appliances, cars, walls, and much more. Everything will become smart, by simply becoming accessories for your wrist.

This vision has precedent in computer science. In the early 1990s, Mark Weiser argued computers would become ubiquitous tools found everywhere in our environment. They would mold themselves to the needs and preferences of whoever was using them at the time. This thinking preceded Minority Report and Her by many years: You’d walk into a room, the computers in it would know who you are, and you’d be able to resume whatever stream of work or play you’d been involved with.

Suite is probably the first time that someone has been far-sighted enough - or crazy enough - to make that impersonal computing ideal a reality. Indeed, perhaps the biggest UX insight behind Neptune’s idea is this: the continuity problems that bedevil our digital lives simply go away if a single, wearable computer becomes a central computing node. No more synching between tablet and phone. No more weird transitions as you try to recreate Internet searches or migrate photos or profiles from one device to another. Moreover, the entire ecosystem gets cheaper when all your screens aren’t simply duplicating each other’s computing power.

The technology seems ready, or least very close to being so. It makes you wonder whether Apple, Samsung and the like might start tinkering as well, or if Neptune has enough of a head start to launch a relatively tiny, but nonetheless radical, product right under their noses.