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."

Comments

Geek chiq

[hey!]

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.

s/Linux//g

[Trinition]

Now, why do you need a Linux based wristwatch do do those things? I do all of those on my PalmOS PDA. Why, someone could put PalmOS on a wirstwatch instead.

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.

Watches too easy to use?

[Greyfox]

The easy to use interface of watches has ruined a generation of watch users! Not only have wrist straps reduced the security of the watch (Someone could look over your shoulder and see the time) but the newfangled digital interface makes it far too easy to tell the time! I long for the day when watches were kept in the pocket, were reserved for the few people who could afford them, and required the user to actually put some effort into learning how to read and maintain his watch!

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!

Does it run Staroffice?

[MeNeXT]

How bout Gnome or KDE?

I just had to......

Need X support

[pesc]

... so I can run xclock!

Sure it's not pretty - it's a RESEARCH project

[screamager]

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.