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."
I thought the Google headline was a little deceiving...
"Fossil unveils wrist-worn Palm OS PDA"
It made me think of Back to the Future and all of the time travel Star Trek episodes!
I don't even use a PDA, but looking at that picture, it strikes me that maybe this thing is *too* small. How can you input anything? You'd better be good with a stylus...
--Gaz
"I turn away with fright and horror from the lamentable evil of functions which do not have derivatives."
I wonder if Fossil's website is powered by one of their watches?
Platform independent bug tracking software
I was the dorky guy in your school who had the calculator wristwatch.
Should I try that again with this thing? After the beatings and the finger pointing? I think not!
While it looks cool and all, it may have hit the market be too late. Cell phones and PDA look to be heading for convergence and almost everyone I know carries a cell phone. Does my watch with its much smaller screen really need to be a (Palm) PDA too? Isn't that why its called a "Palm" and "PocketPC" device?
The day you realize Anonymous Coward isn't the name of a really prolific user, then its time to create your own
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?
and like all the other pda/pc watches it's missing one crucial feature...
WATERPROOF!
Why cant they throw in that small and desperately needed thing? It must be waterproof... so I can wear it swimming,snorkling,in the shower... how about just in the shower/tub without fear of it getting killed?
why cant they do that?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They decided to go with Palm OS because there was no way they could fit Windows CE's EULA into something that small.
RMN
~~~
Pocket PC? All I need is another thing to be able to BSOD on me... Chick: What time is it? Me: It's *bsod* 4B:1A5EDB1
Would anyone seriously use the dinky little stylus that's part of the band? Talk about an ergonomic nightmare (and a choking hazard). Why not just include a selectable-point pen with every watch, that will let you switch between blue/black/red ink and a stylus? That seems to make much more sense from an actual functionality standpoint than that tiny stylus, letting you use the PDA concurrently and seamlessly with more traditional dead-tree technology.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
It's underpowered, sure, but the 68k architecture has been around long enough that, by now, it's a straightforward proposition to manufacture cores at low cost. Device makers are still trying to figure out how to put together ARM devices that land in impulse-buy territory, but Fossil can pack a totally functional 68k PDA into a $150 wristwatch. Nifty.
And what's with the two hour battery life?
Otherwise, very very cool.
Fossil is a hugely popular brand (they even have Fossil stores in airports!) and with the low margins on watches, they might be looking for a new market. I mean, right now, any Taiwanese sweatshop can put together a POS digital watch, hell, some kid in his garage could do that.
Remember when watches only had an hour and a minute hand? And then all of a sudden, they had a second hand, and now the date, several time zones, "chrono" mode and other stuff.
The PDA is the next step in complexity and "needed" features for a wristwatch. If Fossil were to come out with its own Palmtop OS, or maybe even take Opie or something, they could ink a deal with a few fortune 500 companies just with the force of their name.
And what happens at "What's up Wednesday" when your technology-fetishizing boss passes out a gaggle of huge PDA-watches to all the gals in accounting? I think you may have to start firing up the copy machine to print out resumes!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
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.
A palm on the back of your wrist! You know what's next. We'll be eating with our butts and walking on our hands.
Best Windows Freeware
Doubles as a birth control device! Wear one of these puppies and watch the women cross the street to avoid you!
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"