It's just a thermal plate, though, and warms up as if it was your wrist, helping to power the watch if it gets seriously low. The first thing I noticed when opening the box was the charging plate, something you may feel suspicious about. Its representatives said that it's using terms and symbols that people are already familiar with, rather than trying to explain, in depth, its weird power systems. To avoid confusing users, Matrix has a simple battery icon on the watch and talks about a "battery" in its messaging. I assume that Matrix's secret sauce is around the voltage regulator that trickles out power when the watch is in regular use and offers more when GPS is called for. Rather than a battery, the PowerWatch 2 uses a massive capacitor nestled inside its body, which stores the generated charge. Matrix hopes, however, that you'll expose the watch to direct sunlight to help keep its charge going. To bolster the PowerWatch 2's power generation ability, the watch also has a solar panel in the bezel - but, in my experience of wearing lots of warm clothing in a British winter, the solar cell won't get much of a work out in colder climes. How thermocouples work, courtesy of the BBC in the 1970s.
Update your settings here, then reload the page to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. It's perfectly readable in daylight but needs the backlight as soon as it gets dark. It has a full-color LCD screen, which also has serious Casio vibes. The case is 47mm wide and 16mm thick, clad in chunky steel and screws aping Casio's G-Shock aesthetic. It's also crazy big, the sort of big that means you need forearms the size of tree trunks for it to look in proportion. It's ruggedized, for extreme marathoners, and is water-resistant to depths of 200 meters. The company says it's positioning the new PowerWatch as an alternative to high-end running watches, like Garmin's Fenix 6 and Suunto's 9. It offers fitness tracking, smartwatch notifications, heart-rate monitoring and GPS.
The PowerWatch 2 is another wearable designed to sit in the space between a smartwatch and a fitness watch. But after a week with the latest PowerWatch, I found the makers have made good on their claims, even if there are more than a couple of caveats. GPS is notoriously power-hungry, as is optical heart-rate tracking. When I first heard the pitch for the PowerWatch 2, a GPS running watch that didn't have a 'battery' and generated power from your wrist, I was incredulous.