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Top 10 Geek Watches
peanutbutter13 writes "Productdose lists their picks for best geek watches. From the article: "Considering the wealth of geek chic wristwear out there at the moment, we started thinking about the point where nerd-tech meets personal style...and we've compiled a list of our current wristwatch favorites, which we hope will help you channel your inner geek-gent."
You don't get geekier than a watch with a PDA built into it, with little games. Hook a USB cable to it, or get an older model that works with a CRT monitor by flashing barcodes at a little eye sensor to transfer phone numbers and important lists and birthdays. I've had my original series Datalink watch since 1997, and it's only on its second battery, and I use the alarm every morning.
Oh You POS
I refuse to believe the top watch for geeks has come until it sshes into a linux box which then uses ntp to get the time from the atomic clock, and then sends it back. The time would of course be displayed in binary : octal : hex, for hour, minutes, and seconds, respectively.
And, of course, it runs Linux.
DYWYPI?
And for those of us who can't access Coral (because of work restrictions), the story is also available here.
Yes, in Soviet Russia--by a company named Elektronika (the bezel is in Cyrillic)--where time kills you. And it keeps very good time.
I don't think that watches have to be new and digital to be geeky. Consider the Repeater Pocketwatch (Warning: pdf file), for example. The one described there is a 1920 Quarter repeater, but minute repeaters also exist. These watches chime the time when you press a button. Extremely fascinating and complex.
For those of us of a certain age, the Nixon Dictator Watch does not live up to the image conjured by the name. I was expecting something far more sinister; something even Dr. Evil wouldn't wear. [sigh]
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Who has time to look at their wrist, what with moving your face away from the monitor. This is what 'date' and 'cal' are for, or xclock, if you go for that kind of excess.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
IBM created a Linux watch *with* Bluetooth now...
_ e.htm/
http://www.research.ibm.com/trl/projects/ngm/wp10
Looking at the list, I can't help but notice they are mostly about features, and not about ergonomics.
Most of the features talked about don't really help you keep track of time better or use the 'watch' functions more easily. The only real advancement in watch design I've seen since illuminated faces is the watch(from Timex?) that used a simple rotating ring around the bezel to set the alarm. It would be nice if they made a watch that would let you use a control like that, or even an iPod-like touch scroll on the screen, to let you set the time, date, and alarm. It's a PITA setting those on regular digital watches because going too far by a few minutes adjusting them means having to cycle through a whole 12 or 24 hours to get to the time you want again.
It would also be nice if you could activate the light without the other hand, like by knocking it or shaking it a few times. A thinner strap, and a latch that's next to the watch so I don't have the latch digging into my veins when I lay my wrist down would be cool, too. Aside from that, the only "non-watch" feature I would really want in a watch is a LED light that could illuminate the surroundings like one of those keychain lights.
On the watches themselves:
The first one looks cool, but it says that it goes to a 'negative display' (light text on black) at night. I currently have a digital watch with negative display, and one of the reasons I want to get a new watch is that it's harder to read than a positive display watch, especially in dark conditions. The digits are huge, about a full centimeter tall, but it's harder to read than a positive display watch with half-cm digits. Maybe if the light part where actually white instead of grayish and more reflective it would help, but right now it's very hard to read without the light.
The ruler watch: Why?
HF LED watch: Looks cool, but don't try to use it while driving or cycling, you might get a bit distracted trying to figure it out.
Nixie watch: Good luck getting through airport security with that thing.
Dr Aki Ross's watch from Final Fantasy: The spirits within. I ordered one as soon as I heard about them. It doesn't come with the doctor or the holographic stuff, but it sure is a conversation piece.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
And yes I've seen all the prototypes and the computer renderings. It still doesn't mean I can go to a store and buy one off a shelf. Here is what I want this mythical bluetooth watch to do:
-When I have an incoming call it should: display the caller ID, light up the backlight on the watch, and maybe flash a little LED to get my attention. The watch needs one phone specific button to clear the alert and let the call ring out in silence then get sent to voice mail. That's all it needs. It would also be nice to have a button that answers the call on my bluetooth headset, but that's not really necessary. It should prevent the phone from ringing or even vibrating for a couple seconds so I have time to look at the caller ID and make a decision about the call.
-It needs to do something similar for a text message. Maybe just flash the LED a couple times and display something like "new message from Bob" with the backlight lit. If I can read the text message on the phone that would be cool, but not strictly necessary.
-I want a PDA or smartphone to be able to use the watch as a way to alert me of an impending meeting/appointment. The watch should have an open API to let other bluetooth devices talk to it and *be controlled by it* in at least a basic way.
-If I can look through my contact list on my phone through it and use it to place calls and have the audio routed to a bluetooth headset, that would be cool. If not I can live without that feature.
-Be something like a normal watch size. I will not wear something the size of a brick on my arm.
-Have a readable monochrome LCD display. The wathces that were meant for use with that spot / msndirect thing seemed to have this figured out. I don't really have a sense of how big the watches were, but they didn't seem too huge...
-Have a backlight that stays on for however long I hold the backlight button. This is not complex but I've had too many watches where the backlight would only stay on for a couple seconds at a time no matter whether you held the backlight button or not. It drove me nuts to be constantly jabbing that stupid backlight button.
It needs to *NOT* have the following:
-wifi
-a color screen
-a GSM/CDMA radio
-a fast processor
-It's own unique copy of my phone book / contacts / appointments that must be synchronized to other devices. It should not be editing these, just displaying them when they're relavent.
This shouldn't really be that expensive. Bluetooth headsets are down to the $25 range, so obviously the bluetooth hardware isn't that expensive. And digital watches are way under $20 so that can't be a huge issue. This kind of a feature set is the only reason I'd ever be tempted to buy a watch again, so the sooner the watch industry gets on this, the sooner it makes a potential sale.
^I'm with stupid.^
He forgot This.
Slick. I want one.
Personally I think my favorite watch would have to be just an ordinary Casio atomic watch, one of the ones with analog/digital/stopwatch/whatever. All that other geek stuff might be fun and amusing, but as far as actual function goes, the only thing I need is a device that keeps time, and doesn't need to be set.
;-)
(It's also rather nice-looking, despite the fact that I've drowned it once and superglued it twice... my stuff tends to get abused
My second favorite, for reasons still unknown, is one of those Shark Tale promotional things my friend got from a cereal box. I don't know why, I just like the thing.
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
I was just reading about this (hideously expensive prototype) watch, the Seiko Spring Drive.
It is a mechanical self-winding watch (an eccentric rotor winds the mainspring as you move about; nothing extraordinary per se), BUT it doesn't have the conventional mechanical escapement and balance wheel of a mechanical watch; instead, it has a tiny generator (a magnetic rotor and a set of stationary coils) that powers a chip with a quartz oscillator; the chip senses the speed of the rotor and varies the load on the coils to regulate the drag on the rotor and thus the rate of the watch.
The result is a batteryless, self-winding quartz-regulated analog mechanical watch. Very cool, and only costs about as much as a low-end SUV... I would not be at all surprised to see a future version with a radio receiver for time signals. In a decade or so, the technology may filter down to where ordinary mortals can afford such a watch. Or possibly not...
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
And no I'm not this coachgifts cat, it's just the only 24 hour analog self winding watch that's less than like $1500 that I could find period.
"If a quarter is two bits, then a dollar's a byte." -R Deric Miller
I have the entire collection of reversible Star Wars watches from Burger King. And I wear them.
you're all figments of my deranged imagination
While I'm at it, "geek chic" is officially annoying. "Ooh, look at the 'geek cred' I get from wearing a vacuum tube watch! What? What time is it? Well, it'll take a couple of seconds for the tube to heat up, but then I can tell you the time!" What utter shit.
Here's a "geek watch"--it tells time, digitally; stopwatch; alarm; can communicate with your desktop over Bluetooth; has some kind of storage, also accessible via Bluetooth or via a standard USB connector; will sync alarms with iCal/schedule/PDA; can perhaps play a simple game such as Breakout or Othello. Extra-extra features: compass; altimeter; barometer. All of these in a watch would be huge, so select and choose a few. But don't give me some crap watch where it's arduous to tell what fucking time it is. How completely useless.
IMO, a "real geek" will have either a $5 digital watch (that keeps perfect time, and may even have a stopwatch and alarm), or a calculator/databank watch (so they can do bigger math than they can do in their head).
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
My girlfriend is a nurse, and will not wear a digital watch.
I found this out after buying her one when her old watch broke. It seems it's almost impossible to count a pulse and determine heart rate per minute with a digital watch.
With an analog watch, you merely watch the second hand travel around the face of the watch while counting the patients pulses.
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