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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."
that this thing is going to sell very well. It doesn't even look like it would be easy to use. And as I recall the battery only lasts like 48 hours. I wonder how they ever got this idea to market...
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
In terms of coolness factor its a 10, But looking at all the pictures I have seen I am not sure how usable this really is. Sure it has all of the Palm features but its so small, my blind eyes would probably have trouble reading anything without stairing. More impotantly for the price, I would rather have a refurb Handspring Edge and get one of those wallets that has room for my palm if I really needed to keep my palm with me all the time (which is infact how my current setup is. I would rather the USB watch anyday over this one
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
...even in major newspapers. There are many interesting things about this watch/PDA I always wanted to know, but the fact that "The watches...come with a tiny stylus" is a little more personal than what I wanted to know.
I have an original Palm Pilot. I should probably upgrade that some day.
.sig
And if you make a watch too large or weird-looking, the wearer can look so geeky that he may never get a date.
Sanity is overrated...Being CRAZY is much more fun!!!
The Fossil
wrist pda
is very co
nvenient i
f you dont
mind a ver
y small di
splay area
and a tiny
stylus.
But it is
so very st
ylish and
gets me la
id daily.
sulli
RTFJ.
It's a great idea, but it's just too small. I hate the cell phones that attempt to cram so much into such a small space, or the laptops that cram a 1600x1200 resolution into a 15" monitor. With only 2MB of memory and an extremely small screen in a relatively bulky enclosure, I just don't see this as a great product.
It definitely has its uses, but many would be well suited with a larger Palm Pilot or PocketPC.
The Political Programmer
Summary: Functionally clumsy, but it looks cool!!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
"VA Linux" changed its name to "VA Software" when they started selling non-linux things.
So "palm" has to change its name to "bodypart" since they start selling things you don't use in your palm.
For those people who think that a calculator watch just isn't quite geeky enough.
Fossil PDA:
Looks very
high-tech,
but it's
Super hard
to use.
Traditional PDA screens are about as small as you can go while still retaining a reasonable degree of usability. Get a watch that's too large, and it's no longer anything that you want to wear on your wrist.
While the entire concept of being able to wear your gadgets on your wrist is cool, it takes more than simply saying "I'll meet you halfway" to design such a device. Simply put, the PDA is too small, and the watch is too big for most people to be interested in this device.
Unless you're dealing with a very limited input style--think at most four or five buttons and maybe some form of roller switch--it's going to be nearly impossible to develop a viable wrist-worn device that relies on tactile input. Data storage, sure. Even limited data output is doable--an iPod-esque control system could be adapted to a wristwatch, and one can create relatively unobtrusive displays for a watch (without too great of expectations for resolution, readability, or volume.) But trying to drop a PDA into a watch--that's just too much fine motor control and tactile interaction in too small a space to be practical.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
As it it wasn't hard enough to get a date, now they want me to strap a PDA to my wrist. Yeah, that'll reel 'em in...
While I think a watch is one of the ideal places to keep a data device - since you always have it with you (the other being a keychain), I don't see the point of paying a $100+ premium for a fashionable one over a functional one - no matter what you are going to be considered a geek for wearing one these, that you paid $295 for a Fossil branded PalmOS watch versus $179 for a Abacus branded one, only makes you look like a geek that is careless with his money.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
I found entering text, and even accurately tapping on items on the screen, to be awkward and frustrating -- especially with the watch on my arm, but even when I removed it to hold it with both hands.
Yeah, I've always had the same problem with my regularly sized Palm. Whenever I hold it using both hands, it is damn near impossible to use the stylus with any accuracy, much less trying to write letters. However, I don't suspect Palm is going to fix this anytime soon. My inclination is that they will just wait for users to evolve a third hand. Even then, I suppose you will have people trying to hold their Palms with all three of their hands.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
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.
:
...
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
that Flava-Flav will now hang an iBook around his neck?
I'm left handed, and I wear my watch on my left wrist... so am I supposed to change which wrist I wear my watch on after 20 years?
Should I try graffiti with my right hand? I have a hard enough time with my left.
Palm pilot...$70
Palm pilot watch w/ almost no features...$300
Look on wife's face...priceless.
It's for tennis. I'm going to program it to keep score/stats for me. After every point, I'll indicate whether I won or lost and why (eg, double-fault, forced error, unforced error, service winner, ace...) Then it can sync with my computer and over time I'll have in-depth statistics on my match, so I can compare myself to Agassi and see the precise scientific extent to which I suck. I'm assuming, of course, that I can actually program the thing. And that it's water resistant. Hm.
Wow, a lucrative publishing contract! I don't have to be evil anymore. --Meteor
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
LARGER!!!
add THREE
INCHES to
your styl
us!!
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
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.
Well, I think she was referring mostly to posted speed limits, and how she would commonly drive 5-10 mph under the limit, but...
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
amazon.com revised its shipping date to 30th of September. http://www.i4u.com/article489.html
Part of the problem, as people have mentioned, is that the screen is simply too fscking small. Too small to do really look at data (address books, etc), too small for input (stylis or not) - just too small.
It almost seems to me that we need to wait until we have an interface that can be built on the fly - say, a hologram idea.
Now, let's pretend that this actually works, and, a la Star Trek style, ignore the science: you have a flat pane of the watch that normally tells time. At the touch of a button, an interface appears over the watch that is about the same size of a standard PDA screen. It is able to sense the location of objects moving over it, so you could "touch" the images with your fingers, "scroll" through the address book, read an e-book (though you might want to move the watch for that to make it more comfortable, etc). You would have to allow the user to shift the display (so if you're driving, you can make it stay "upright" as you look into your address book before smacking into the car ahead of you because you didn't have your eyes on the road).
If you wanted to be really cool, you could let the user lay the watch flat, and "expand" the interface into a whole desktop complete with "keyboard" so they could type, use their fingers as pointer devices, etc. (We are of course pretending that the watch's electronics are so small and heat efficient they don't burn a hole in your wrist/desk to compute all of this information).
This technology I'm sure is about 15-20 years off, but I think that's what you would need to allow something that small to have an interface worth using.
Of course, this is just a "pull the idea out of my ass" concept - I could be totally wrong as to whether this would be useful or not.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
For those people who think that a calculator watch just isn't quite geeky enough.
Uh huh. And the rest of us look like James Bond with our tri-corders clipped to our belts, right?
There's no left-handed variant. A normal watch you learn to deal with; one windy button you use once-in-a-while is OK... But when there're a load of buttons on one side of the watch, and no easy alternative, it's completely unusable by lefties.
I mean, the normal palm is bad at times with the scrollbar on the wrong side of the screen [don't tell me about lefthack; it breaks Eudora]
Experiment: Put your watch on your right wrist. Now change the time. Now imagine you need to do this with far more dexterity.
Bah. They're only losing about 10-15% of the market by doing that, so no great loss, I guess...
Gary (-;
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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