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Microsoft Shows Off Watch, Portable Media Player
gmt-time points to this New York Times article with a report from the in-progress Consumer Electronics Show, excerpting "Microsoft, continuing its effort to extend its reach beyond computers, today introduced designs for a new class of watch that gives more than the time and a pocket audio and video player." According to the article, several manufacturers are committed to producing both the watches (mentioned yesterday as well) and the audio/video players. I wonder if they'll play Ogg Vorbis and my DivX;) files ...
Why not get a Timex Pager Watch?
A Microsoft Watch Will Provide Much More Than Time
By SAUL HANSELL
AS VEGAS, Jan. 8 -- Microsoft, continuing its effort to extend its reach beyond computers, today introduced designs for a new class of watch that gives more than the time and a pocket audio and video player.
The designs, which will be available from several manufacturers by the end of the year, were presented by Microsoft's chairman, Bill Gates, in a speech today that opened the annual International Consumer Electronics Show here.
But even as the company extends its reach to new devices, Microsoft's vision is closely linked to the computer. Both the watch -- which can provide weather information, text messages and other data -- and the media player are designed to be controlled through wireless connections to their owners' PC's.
In an interview today, Mr. Gates said he saw a world in which the personal computer was increasingly linked wirelessly to all manner of displays.
"You will have devices in the home of different screen sizes: wall-sized for a lot of people to watch, desk-sized for doing homework or taxes, and pocket-sized for information you have with you at all times, and watch-sized," he said. "We will make all those work together."
Mr. Gates's vision is very much a hot topic of the electronics show here, where more than 2,000 manufacturers are displaying their wares to 100,000 attendees. Much of the focus has been on wireless networking and other ways to connect digital devices like CD and DVD players, cameras and computers.
But Microsoft is trying to avoid the cutthroat business of hardware manufacturing in consumer electronics, as it has in computers, and it hopes instead to profit by licensing its software. The new products have license fees of $10 to $25 a unit, Microsoft executives said.
The media player, called Media2Go, resembles the Apple iPod, in that it has a 20-gigabyte hard drive that can hold hundreds of songs. But it also has a color screen for watching videos and looking at photographs. Microsoft showed a mockup with a 3.5-inch screen, but some manufacturers would make larger versions with 7-inch screens, it said. Samsung, iRiver, Sanyo and ViewSonic have agreed to make versions of the device, which is expected to sell for less than $500.
The device will not be able to hold movies from DVD's. But it will store and play home movies and video downloaded from the Internet. It will also be able to store copies of broadcast and cable television programs recorded by Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition.
Rob Enderle, a research fellow with the Giga Information Group, said there was great demand for such personal video players.
"It's going to be the biggest thing in 2003," he said. "Our testing shows that it least has the market potential of Apple's iPod if not quite a bit more."
He said that Apple was thought to be working on a version of the iPod with video ability, but it lost an opportunity to be the first to market when it did not announce the product as some people expected at the Macworld conference on Tuesday.
The watch will initially be made by Fossil, Citizen and Suunto. The simplest versions will cost less than $150, but the watchmakers will also make much more expensive designs. The watch will require a subscription to a data service, which Microsoft executives said might have a fee of $5 to $12 a month or might be included in the price of some watches.
All of the watches will have a small, rectangular liquid crystal display and the ability to receive short data messages, much like a pager. This technology will allow the watch to identify where it is and what the local time is -- and the local weather forecast -- as the wearer travels.
The watch will also be able to receive the wearer's personal calendar sent from a personal computer and instant messages sent through Microsoft's messaging service.
Microsoft has built a new national wireless data network, based on the data broadcasting ability of FM radio stations. The company says that compared with traditional paging systems, this network makes it cheaper both to broadcast data and build receivers. It said the microchips for the watch, which it designed, cost less than $10 each wholesale.
Microsoft's watch design is the first instance of what it calls smart personal object technology, or SPOT, which powers devices with access to information. William H. Mitchell, the general manager of the smart personal objects unit, said such a device could be sold for less than $20.
Viva Anales!
I believe that nintendo's video game watches should be cited as prior art.
They will be using one of the subcarriers on the FM broadcast signals, like they do with elevator music.
Pirating the signal should be a fairly easy hack, as long as the encryption is not too strong.
They used the cores of the BSD and Mach kernels to design their own kernel. The rest of the system (except for the BSD/GNU shell tools) is completely theirs. Probably 95% of OS X code was written by Apple.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.