Look ma, no hands! Design firm invents a hands-free, hard-to-read, costly smart clock — but it plays sounds, too, at least!

• Balmuda has designed a unibody aluminum smart travel clock with no hands
• Inspired by pocket watches, but considerably more chunky
• Available in Japan for around $373 / £279 / AU$529

Update: This article originally said that The Clock was designed by former Apple design Jonathan Ive's firm, LoveFrom. Balmuda contacted TechRadar to say this was incorrect, and that it had only collaborated with Balmuda on a previous product, not on The Clock. We have correct this element of the story, while the rest remains as previously written.

Inspired by old-fashioned pocket watches and made by Japanese brand Balmuda, The Clock is a connected travel clock with no hands, and joins Balmuda's other luxury products including The Brew coffee maker, The Speaker wireless speaker and The Kettle electric kettle.

According to Balmuda, "we wanted to do more than just display the time; we wanted to make time itself a pleasant experience." And to do that, the firms have collaborated on an analog clock that doesn't have any hands.

What is The Clock?

Rather than use hands to show the time, The Clock uses LEDs in a system that Balmuda calls the "Light Hour". It illuminates the digit for the hour and then lights up tick marks around the circumference of the face to show the minutes. Another tick becomes the seconds hand, moving around the display.

There's an aluminum unibody case for The Clock, giving it very Apple-like look, since the firm also favors aluminum unibody construction, even in the new budget MacBook Neo. Balmuda has previously collaborated with former Apple design chief Jonathan Ive's firm LoveFrom — perhaps the company is still feeling his influence.

It's 7.5cm wide and tall, and weighs just under 260g, and it charges via USB-C. Each charge lasts 24 hours, which seems a bit short for a clock battery to last to us as well.

In addition to the time display, The Clock also features ambient soundtracks composed specifically for The Clock's Relax Time mode, including "the sound of rain, the rumble of a boat on a river, and the crackling of a lodge fireplace" played with "astonishing realism."

International pricing hasn't been announced but The Clock is currently available in Japan for around $373 / £279 / AU$529.

According to Gen Terao, Balmuda CEO, The Clock was designed to solve a personal problem. Listening to rain sounds on his phone as he tried to get to sleep, he "started to wonder if having these social devices by my bedside might be related to my sleep. And then it occurred to me: Wouldn't it be great to have a personal clock made with modern technology that plays the gentle sound of rain, a really nice sound to fall asleep to?"

The movement of the second hand illumination was apparently based on Foucault's pendulum in the National Museum of Nature and Science, and the moving lights during Relax Time soundtracks were "inspired by the flickering lights of distant cities and the twinkling of stars."

It's nice that Terao found a solution to his concerns, but I find The Clock's design a step backwards in terms of readability: for me at least it's slower to read than a traditional clock face and I suspect that the choice of white illumination on a light-colored aluminum face is going to be hard to see in even mildly bright sunlight.

That said, I'm not the target audience for The Clock: I much prefer (and own) Braun clocks, which are inspired by the creations of industrial design idol Dieter Rams, such as the Braun BC02 and the Classic wall clock. Braun's cute Classic travel clocks are less than one-tenth of the cost of The Clock – and the price includes a sturdy set of good old-fashioned hands.

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