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More Revealed on the IBM Linux Wristwatch
bitFliper writes: "This site has more information about IBM's Linux wristwatch, including a whole page of pictures here. Linux 2.2 OS with 8MB Flash memory and 8MB DRAM memory. It weigh's in at 44 gms (approximately 1.5 ounces), has a touch sensitive display, IrDA, radio frequency wireless connectivity, and a
rechargeable lithium-polymer battery. Pretty cool."
The iPAQ is pretty much the consumer version of the Itsy. Go get one and hack the hell out of it doing things Compaq never expected.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
so that you can be cool looking AND read your Linux watch's readout.
EMUSE.NET
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Oh, you'd have to be a geek, but I don't think it's necessarily the ugliest watch I've ever seen.
Style is supposed to convey a message. The people who made furniture for Louis XIV would be puzzled by the modern taste for mission style furniture, where ornamentation is confined to a few artfully placed structural members. Style to them was a demonstration that you had the wealth to use the costliest materials and the labor to work them lavishly. People who use mission furniture in their homes are telling you that they are sophisticates enough to appreciate a more abstract aesthetic tied to simplicity and natural materials and finishes used tastefully and functionally.
Style or anti-style is always about making a statement. I'm trying to decode the iMac's transparency, but its significance escapes me. Perhaps it is supposed to suggest that you aren't intimidated by technology, and so don't need to hide it. Or maybe that you're technological and artistic impulses are balanced and in harmony.
In any case, I personally think that "proto" (as in prototype) is a style that's ready to take off. What the proto style will say is that you are more concerned with having the latest functionality than any frou-frou ornamentation. Imagine you are in a meeting and somebody whips out an oddly shaped block of plastic and starts scribbling on it. When asked, he tells you its one of a dozen industrial prototypes for the next generation Palm Pilot -- would you be impressed? If you saw somebody at LinuxWorld wearing one of these watches, would you be a bit jealous?
Style ultimately is a statement that you possess something that is rare and hard to obtain -- wealth, power, or discernment. Having access to the to technology so new that it hasn't been commercialized yet is also a rare and desirable thing. It's a geek value, but as geeks get more economic clout it will penetrate the general consciousness. It is only a matter of time before designers figure out how to dress up mass manufactured objects to give them the semblance of having this property of extreme newness -- they way they used gold plating, colored plastic, and injection molding to suggest the rare materials or skilled workmanship valued in older aesthetics.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
About two-dozen of the prototypes have been created so far. The watches run on an ARM-based EP7211 processor made by Cirrus Logic and have 8MB of memory to run programs and 8MB of flash memory to substitute for a hard disk. The watches also include an infrared and wireless radio connection and a touch-screen display. The watch can tell time and has a calendar and to-do list that can remind the wearer of appointments, Goyal said
Pretty Cool huh? :) No I am not linking to the article, you can do it from the IBM site (so I am lazy alright!! :))
Gorkman
Radio receiver built in for wireless capability. Local range only, perhaps to conserve battery drain it would be activated via a hotsynch button though hopefully it would be able to have it on all the time without too much trouble. Very small bitmapped display which is only used for alphanumerics and special characters that can be used as an abbreviation for full words. Screen space on a watch is valuable. Every character has to count. And a few buttons around it. Not like those old calculator watches, that goes too far. I want buttons around the sides so screen space is maximized as much as possible.
Note there is only receive on the wireless part. This thing is a data display device, and the buttons are for browsing. Just as the Palm people reinvented the user interface from the ground up this watch would have its user interface redesigned from the ground up. One button might be a display time/display pages/access database toggle. Hit the button a few times and you switch between the main common uses of the watch instantly, no fuss, from whereever you are, like the application icon on the Palm. Other buttons would probably be more modal.
This watch would function as a watch, as a pager (and maybe to notify when you have important mail), and a portable phone/email/address list. Maybe a few other things as well like sports scores (not that I'm that big a fan but others are), stock prices (ditto) and so forth. My current pager has a feature where it picks up news headlines. Not all that uninteresting a feature, as long as I had some way to filter for what I was interested in.
The watch has a small screen space, limited control/input capability and the power requirements have to be insanely low. The positive side it has the ultimate convenience factor of being always available, faster than a PDA. The computer watch has to play to these strengths if it is to ever really take off.
This was sometime in the early 1980s.
The month of the issue was April. :-)
Seastead this.
xdaliclock -cycle &
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Just for starters (my thinking for about 3 seconds), here are a few things you could run on it...
Clock, calendar, stopwatch, alarms, etc... (obviously)
A Notepad
A date book / day planner
Address book
Phone book
Calculator
Currency conversions
GPS
Communication (send data to other watches?)
Email?
Hm... I suspect this was "inspired" by a post over at Ars Technica. Their article links to this page as well, which has a review of Casio's wrist watch with built-in digital camera. It's pretty cool, too. 20 kpixel 16-level grayscale, 100 pictures storable in the watch. Syncs over IR to a serial-port connected mini-dock thingie. Not comparable in power to IBM's Linux watch, and it doesn't run Linux, but it's still a very cool thing to have on your wrist, IMO. Being a consumer product (~$200 in the US), it has seen a bit more design effort, too. ;^)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
The point isn't exclusively the OS, its how well the applications match the form-factor of the device you're dealing with. While the article points out the advantages of Linux (for example, large code base available), I'm not convinced that those advantages translate directly to this mostly-unexplored form-factor.
Dealing with limited colors, memory, display size, etc. are special considerations for the wrist-watch even more so than the PDA.
Just imagine how all those script kiddies would act when the time reached
:)
1:37 pm
or
13:37
-
As cunning as a fox, which has just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford University. http://www.kinlan.co
Moreover, all watches should be set to display time in GMT only, and you should memorize the offset between GMT and your home! This would eliminate timezone confusion at the expense of a little math that you should be able to do in your head, and further goes to demonstrate my uber-eliteness and the fact that my penis must be much longer than all the rest of you plonkers out there who would never have thought of that!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I just had to......
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
you'd really have to be a geek to wear something like that... don't you agree?
________
... so I can run xclock!
)9TSS
- Obviously, clock, calendar, stopwatch, alarms, etc...
- A Notepad
- A date book / day planner
- Address book
- Phone book
- Calculator
- Temperature conversions
- Currency conversions
- TV remote control (via the IR port)
- Score/stat keeping for my favorite sports (golf, football, baseball stats,
...) - All sorts of specialized calculators for whatever... (Miles/Kilometers per gallon, fuel cost calculations for example)
The list is theoretically endless.My office has been taken over by iPod people.
As stated on the site, the watch (at least in its current 'ugly' incarnation) is only a research project to test the water for the inclusion of Linux across a wide range of devices. I wouldn't worry too much yet about how it looks.
Oops...What I was going for was:
# echo "decss"
# MPAA v. IBM lawsuit
Thanks for the personal attack...preciate it!
Sig it.
- They state the watch has "a powerful processor", but don't specify which one. Granted, it's probably an IBM-designed chip that hasn't been released to the public, but they could have at least said something along the lines of "a powerful new processor developed by IBM".
- They claim to have X11 running on it, but don't have any pictures of it running X11.
- 8MB Flash memory and 8MB DRAM seems like rather a lot to put in that watch - especially when it has to share that space with the processor, IrDA and radio communication equipment, and an LCD sreen.
All this leads me to wonder: is this thing for real? I'm not completely skeptical - IBM has created some really cool things that I wasn't sure were even possible - but this one is straining the limits of believability.-Ender
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
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.
[
with the IR port - exchange business contact info (vcard or so) with someone else wearing one just by shaking hands.
Ch-chuck on remote assignment.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Don't wait for a Yopy -- get yerself an iPAQ, reflash it with Linux, and start hacking.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Hence the "more revealed" in the subject line.
I know we've heard about it before...but it's even better now we've got some real info about it!
Although it may not be news well known elsewhere, the watch was actually developed at IBM's India offices where the Linux division is *RATHER* active. The offices also recently got a SEI CMM Level 5 rating!
The Official IBM Website isn't very infomative about this though!.
All weakness is within you, As is all courage.
This is an "Office watch". ;-) :-)
Most people wearing a watch want to keep it in most situations and if somebody wanders in Düsseldorf with one of these, it will sure get drown.
I'd also love if they could embed voice-recognition inside though, imagine in the streets somebody yelling "mkfs" in your back
Well, this'd sure be annoying too.
Okay, I admit I am totally blasted by this cool watch but we also have to find some issues about it or it won't be a discussion anymore.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.