ReVault Smartwatch: The Most Compelling Apple Watch Alternative Yet

There are very few compelling smartwatches on the market (or coming to the market in the foreseeable future), and the list of actual potential winners is pretty short. Most of the truly interesting, radical, and outright outlandish ideas have come from the crowdfunding sites Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but the bigger commercial players are staying pretty vanilla with their plans and roadmaps. We expect fitness tracking, notifications, and ultralight app experiences, and the use list seems to die there in the labs of Apple and Samsung and LG et al.

But the indie firms sometimes have great ideas. Pebble’s the obvious success story, but there’s another idea that’s recently been funded which I think warrants close attention: the ReVault Smartwatch.

This thing is pretty genius. Dubbed the “world’s first wearable private cloud,” the ReVault simultaneously gets around the cellular and Wi-Fi data constraints of cloud-based mobile storage (particularly for large files), it replaces portable USB drives, and it frees up space on your smartphone of choice. This feature set — portability, wearability, and secure data storage — is the ReVault’s primary use case, and it’s one that no other smartwatch I’ve seen or heard about actually addresses.

Better, it’s a use case that, while intentionally limited in scope, is eminently useful for a huge contingent of mobile users. Check out the video and tell me you dont want one of these (or, at the very least, for Apple to offer something similar — although I personally hope Cupertino leaves these folks alone):

As you can see, the ReVault — which comes in 32GB and 128GB capacities — handles basic smartwatch duties, too: notifications, media streaming, custom faces, a developer API for apps, and so on. It also supports Android, Windows, OS X, and Linux in addition to iOS. Sure, there’s no heart rate monitor, but honestly, as things stand right now, I think I’d prefer to wear the ReVault all day and just put on my Apple Watch Sport for the gym. I am literally that enthusiastic about this device, and that’s rare.

While pricing — $219 to $319 — might be an issue for early mainstream adoption, the ReVault has real potential.

Now if I can just get my poor wrist a sample unit…