Slashdot Mirror
Real PDA Wristwatch
Larry Groebe writes "Just before COMDEX, Fossil announced a new PDA in a wristwatch. Based on the Palm OS, this is nothing less than a complete Palm Pilot on your wrist. See here for features and a picture.
This is completely UNLIKE Fossil's *first* attempt at a wrist PDA, which was a hopeless view-only gadget. This new model allows regular Graffiti input and appears to run all Palm programs! At $149, I may be the first in line when it comes out next spring."
They've got more news on the new watch, as well as some nice pictures.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
There are some inherent problems with this solution. Screen size is an issue, ie. is there even enough space to display a full name on one line? How about their address and phone number?
...)
Also, you had better hope there's a smart keylock implemented so you aren't walking around erasing all of your files without realizing it (damn, sure is crowded on these New York subways
In the long run, we're all dead.
You got all of that for less than $100?
Even if they were all used from ebay or garage sales, I don't think you can find a GBA for less than $60... that leaves $40 for the remaining 6 systems. I call bullshit.
I worked on it 2 summers ago at IBM Research (get paid well to work on cool things, who can ask more).
It was never meant to be an IBM product (at least from my understanding). It was meant to be a sort of cool "testbed" for all these mini technologies. Such as OLEDs (at the time we had the highest density OLED displays in production on our prototypes), mini linux on the software side and similiarly on the hardware side.
We were also trying to figure out what cool things we could do with it, such as we had a bluetooth module for it, so we initally had a demo of that that one could switch ones slides via the watch's thumbwheel, (so one's giving a talk, and walking around and just tap the watch to switch slides back and forth). But we were experimenting with different things as well, such as imagine sticking a GPS receiver in your backpack while you are hiking and just use the watch as a display for the GPS, it stores the data in the backpack. Since the OLED display was 640x480 (1bpp) it was fairly detailed.
doing this also involved getting things like PPP working on the watch (which since I had gcc working on our testbed's that had ethernet (nfs mount w/ nfs swap), meant we could get gcc working on the watch, though wouldn't have been so much fun as testbench was 70-80mhz, while watch ran at something like 17mhz (these numbers might be off)
We were also doing work on getting the system even smaller than it was (glibc's a hog, a simple fix was getting uClibc working on it, I was then able to take this know how to make a bootable linux floppy that boots directly into a windows terminal services server full screen (basically kernel, X, dhcp, rdesktop all on a single bootable floppy) for a school project).
That summer there was interest from citizen (They actually made some PR announcmenets) in making a product out of it, but dont know whats happened since in regards to that.
people in charge of IBM Research wanted to put funding behind the watch to give out samples to U's involved in pervasive devices (I believe CMU and Georgia Tech are big into it) to basically have them see what they can do with these pieces of tech, but dont know what's happened on that either.
According to the FAQ on their Web site- you have to CHANGE the batteries. That means it doesn't charge when syncing. What a joke!
Here's a large pic.
sulli
RTFJ.
Yea, according to their specs, battery life is like 4 days! The only good thing is that the batteries are Lithium-ion rechargable. They don't say how they are recharged, but according to the linked page, the watch has a USB port. So onw can assume you hook it up to your computer's USB port to recharge at night or something.
My good sig is in the laundry
According to the specs (linked from Fossil's PDA page), the battery does last only 4 days with use, but is rechargable Li-Ion.
For your viewing please, the Nerd Watch Museum. On that same site you may also want to check out the Walkman Museum, the Boombox Mueeum, and the miscellaneous gadgets of the 70s and 80s.