Slashdot Mirror

As I look down at my left wrist, I see a large onHand PC looking back at me. 2 MB of memory, all kinds of PIM goodies and games, and it syncs up with my PC. Battery life is better than what is promised for the Fossil. My wife bought it for me two years ago. It's the US version of the Japanese Ruputer, which is almost four years old. So tell me again how this 8-bit wonder from Fossil can possibly be considered "News?"

Prior to the onHand, I wore a Casio Databank. I like the little keys and the availability of the instant calculator. It makes short work of the usual arguments around the restaurant table.

My ideal watch would combine the ease of calculator input and battery life of the Casio with the Calendar/Phonebook/Notepad features of the onHand. While I'm dreaming, I'd like a built-in cell phone and a date with Sarah Alexander...

Truth is stranger than fiction: According to the CIA World Factbook, the Taliban flag is plain white.

Matsucom has been making a similar watch -- the "onhand" for some time now. Technologically, the ibm watch does a whole lot more, but if all you want is the ability to run your own programs on your wrist, it'll do.

Most important, the onhandpc has a free SDK. The specs: It has a 16-bit CPU (V20ish I think), running a dos look-alike. It has 128KB RAM, 512KB ROM, and 2MB FLASH. The display isn't nearly as nice as IBM's prototype OLED: 102x64 backlit STN LCD. But it does have IR and wired serial ports. The battery life is rated at 3 months (assuming display one hour per day). The big thing missing is the bluetooth. (Well, that and linux).

The nice part: Price = $300. But still (in my opinion) a toy. For more info, here's a nice review (from late '99).

Matsucom has been making a similar watch -- the "onhand" for some time now. Technologically, the ibm watch does a whole lot more, but if all you want is the ability to run your own programs on your wrist, it'll do.

Most important, the onhandpc has a free SDK. The specs: It has a 16-bit CPU (V20ish I think), running a dos look-alike. It has 128KB RAM, 512KB ROM, and 2MB FLASH. The display isn't nearly as nice as IBM's prototype OLED: 102x64 backlit STN LCD. But it does have IR and wired serial ports. The battery life is rated at 3 months (assuming display one hour per day). The big thing missing is the bluetooth. (Well, that and linux).

The nice part: Price = $300. But still (in my opinion) a toy. For more info, here's a nice review (from late '99).

Show me a PIM that lets me enter notes quickly and I'll beat a path to your door. Until then, it doesn't matter whether the PIM is running PalmOS, DIPOS, or VMS - it's just another geek toy, suitable for impressing fellow geeks and inducing glazed eyes in everyone else.

The remarkable thing about a dancing bear is not how well it dances, but that it dances at all.

Of course, it's not Linux, so some people may decide it's worthless. However, you may want to check out the Matsucom OnHand PC.

A friend of mine has developed a couple little applets for it, has worn it for a year now.

An alternative that has been out for a while is the Matsucom onHand PC.

From the spec sheet, 128KB RAM, 512KB ROM, 2MB Flash. 102x64 B&W LCD screen. Infrared and RS232 connections to PCs. An IBM-style nub pointer control, and four buttons. 52 grams and it is water resistant.

A friend of mine has written a few apps for it, the SDK is available.

Of course, since it isn't running Linux, this may not be of interest to some people.

That reminds me of this onHand PDA thing I saw, incase some of you don't know, it is a small device that fits on your wrist as a watch, and it is a PDA, now with this...one running Linux could be great, the onHand runs on Windows CE i believe. No matter what the OS though, a watch computer seems too cool, so I think I'm going to definitely pick one up.

They run for $299 check it out here onhandpc.com

for me, this is only and truly wearable PC: www.onhandpc.com

--
jaime g. wong
webmaster of the guidelight project
http://www.guidelight.f2s.com

"...where the forms could be automatically read, via the RF interface, without even opening the envelopes."

Er, what's to stop me from swiping your mail (somewhere in the chain there's bound to be a weak link, or even from within the mail system itself, we know how dependable they are) and reading it myself? I realize that Census records aren't that interesting, although I'm sure many corporations would love the market research. But if that sorta thing caught on: what if your taxes were filled via paper computer? Sounds like an easy way to get confidential information out of unsuspecting victims.

And anyway, why send a paper computer (which would cost more than paper, and takes a while to reach the destination) when you can send email (with an attachment if need be)? This might be a good idea in a very small amount of applications (in areas where email isn't a viable option for security reasons, for instance), but it seems like it has been outdated by more recent, cheaper, and faster alternatives. Once encryption reaches the right levels, we should be able to do much of what he suggests online (in fact, we already can). If you factor in the fact that all the technology in that paper computer could easily be built into the wall next to your front door (or anywhere), it seems like getting computer-paper mail would be a waste of resources. Factor in portable computers (both PDAs and the more techno-keen wearable computers) and e-books and you have a pretty small market.

I think that, sad as it may be, the market for paper computers is almost past. It would have been a perfect technology for the transition to a more technologically integrated culture (read: computers built into the infrastructure and daily life, but they're so inconspicuous you hardly notice them), but since we seem to be on the road there already--see the computer touchphone, the on-hand PC and driving with night vision--I don't think it's going to work in this late stage. I'm sorry for Jim, but I just don't think he's gonna have luck with the invention. Damn cool invention though.

• Power Consumption
• 
  This is one of the areas that a lot of progress has been made in. IBM's wearable gets three hours of battery life. Thad's wearable gets fifteen. Know what else? He never has his hard drives spin down or his display turn off. He accomplishes this amazing feat by using extremely low power hardware; his wearable is composed of PC-104 boards. You can find more information about the hardware at MIT's Wearable Computing Project.

• Display
• 
  The biggest obstacle to widespread acceptance of wearable computers, in my opinion, is the display. They are, at the moment, extrememly expensive. Quite a bit of technical progress has been made, however. Kopin makes some tiny displays (unfortunately no wearable designs shown on their page), but the ones we use most in the CCG are the ones made by MicroOptical. This page has a photo of the clip-on glasses display prototype; we've got non-prototype models in use, and let me tell you, they are sweet. They are extremely lightweight, slim, and space-age looking. Of course, they're also about $5000 apiece, but that's why we have grants. =)

• Input
• 
  Input is a bit of a problem. Nobody's developed an intuitive, easy to use input device. The Twiddler is the one most used by wearables researchers at the moment. It's a chording, one-handed keyboard with 12 keys (three rows of four) on the front for the fingers, and five keys for the thumb. It acts as both keyboard and mouse, as it has tilt sensors that let you control the pointer. The Twiddler is neat, and very useful, but it's about as hard to learn as touch-typing. MIT's wearables pages have some info on other input devices buried within them.

• Interface
• 
  This is another potential obstacle to widespread use of wearable computers. Thad runs Linux (Slackware, I belive) on his wearable, and his interface to everything is: XEmacs! Yes, XEmacs, heavily modified to do everything he needs it to. One of the most revolutionary applications it uses is the Remberance Agent (PDF). This watches the files on your drive and what you're typing, and suggests a list of related files every 10 seconds or so. In this way, you can see things that might be related to what you're doing currently. For instance, if I'm typing up an article (such as this one), and I talk about Brad Rhodes, the Remberance Agent might display a filename such as "rhodes-RA.pdf", reminding me that he was the one who wrote the Remberance Agent. Or, if I'd met him at ISWC and put his name in "ISWC99-people.txt", that could come up and remind me as well.

• Size
• 
  Size is one of the least concerning of any of these issues. Technology will progress, and things will get smaller. Eventually, we can expect to have powerful computers that fit in our pockets, or on our wrists (check here for a wrist-sized palm pilot). Size is currently a consideration, but it's the least of them.

http://www.ruputer.com/ is the home page for a Seiko made watch that runs a flavor of DOS, and has a publicly available SDK based on gcc. The truly geeky will just decode the Japanese home page, but if you want it the easy way: http://www.ruputer.com/english/ is the english language version of the site, and their U.S. distributer is http://www.onhandpc.com/ The ruputer has a speaker, and an IrDA compatible infrared port.