Apple’s iPod Nano has morphed into many different form factors throughout its various generations. The mini music player’s most recent iterations have given the public a small touchscreen square, seemingly perfect to use as a watch. One of the first companies to take a stab at giving this to the public is Lunatik, a company founded Scott Wilson, founder of the design firm MINIMAL and former Global Creative Director for Nike Watches
I had the opportunity to try out the LYNK Blackout aluminum watch and have been using it for a while. The construction of the watch is fantastic, giving off a sturdy vibe and feel while managing to be light on your wrist, as is necessary due to the heft of the iPod Nano itself. Insertion of the iPod Nano into the LYNK watchband is fairly simple. At the same time, inserting the Nano can be mildly annoying as the screws aren’t the simplest things to screw and unscrew, because they’re not standard and require the supplied screwdriver.
Overall, the watchband does a fantastic job of trying to convert the iPod Nano into a watch, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental flaw of the watch itself: the iPod’s LCD screen. Due to the nature of any LCD screen, the iPod nano sucks up way too much battery life to last for a significant amount of time and times out to a black screen too easily, even with the timer set to the max amount of time. So, regardless of the good job the LYNK Blackout does of supporting the iPod, it just doesn’t cut it as a watch.
As much as I praise LunaTik for crafting a well-made product, Apple’s engineers need to set out to make the iPod Nano more watch-friendly for the product to succeed. Perhaps an OLED display to save battery life (it uses no power to display black) and a lighter design would help. Until then, I can’t recommend buying an iPod Nano and LYNK with the idea to use the combo as a watch, but if Apple ever steps up their game, LunaTik would be where I would turn.
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