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Fossil/Palm PDA Watch Reviewed
SLiK812 writes "Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has a pretty good review of Palm's and Fossil's new wrist PDA. We all knew some time ago that this was coming out, and was initially covered last November and briefly last month. This is the first review I've seen, and Mossberg does bring up some interesting points, both good and bad. Definitely worth the read before buying it."
Assuming I would want to wear an ugly huge watch (that's a personal opinion of couse) that's called "Fossil" and is MSN-enabled (uuh), I have a problem with such small devices that have an internal battery.
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From the specs page
POWER REQUIREMENTS : AC power adapter (100V-240V), DC output (4V-9V), Lithium-ion rechargeable battery (internal).
BATTERY LIFE : 4-5 days (based on average use of 30 minutes per day with no backlight or IR)
Right, so in real life, if I was to use the thing normally, with backlight at night and syncing with my desktop with IR, I'd say I'd probably have to charge it up every 2 or 3 days. Given that a real-life Li-Ion batteries have a typical life of 300 recharge cycles (yes, you can get more out of them, but you have to be *very* careful when you charge and for how long, which isn't always practical in a consumer device), especially since it's probably a super-small fragile battery, that means the battery will have to be changed after 2.5 years of use at most.
Do I want to see the face of the watch repairman when I bring him the Fossil for a battery change? Do I want to see the bill when I have to send the watch back to Fossil for a battery replacement? No.
So, no PDA watch for me. Nosiree
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
From the article:
But the most interesting feature of the Wrist PDA has nothing to do with the Palm functionality. In watch mode, when the thing is just telling time, you can scroll through and select from a wide variety of different watch-face designs. This is the first watch I know of that lets you pick the way its face looks and change that look as often as you like.
Well, duh! It's a Palm, so of course you can make the watch have whatever face you want!
My Palm III (all of $11 on eBay) has multiple clock faces, too -- Analog, Big Digital Clock with world time and weekday-only alarms, another Analog version, and my favorite, the Hell Clock with built-in countdown to Halloween. "Hell Clock" is the one that I like to beam to the cell phones at the Verizon store, to give them more "visual interest".
I'd have dozens more, but I lost interest after four. And I didn't pay one red cent for any of 'em (all were freeware at the time).
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Nobody seems to have mentioned the time-tested Casio Databank watch yet, so here is the product comparison with the Fossil PDA watch:
:^) If you use a CR2032 battery instead of the CR2016, and you turn off the hourly chime and alarms, you can get about 8-10 years use out of one battery!
Fossil features: clock, calculator, backlight, address book, date book, to-do list, IrDA port, ability to run Palm apps, and a memo pad.
Casio features: clock, calculator, backlight, address book (kinda), 5 alarms, world time, atomic time synchronization and a stopwatch.
Fossil battery life: five days
Casio battery life: two years
Fossil price: $295
Casio price: $89
I'm going to stick with my Casio Databank.
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