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Goodbye To the SPOT Watch
Starturtle sends along an Engadget article on the demise of the Microsoft SPOT Watch. We've discussed related devices a few times in the past; here's a picture of one. "After a long, painful, nearly anonymous ride on the wrists of a select few uber-geeks, Microsoft's finally throwing in the towel on one of its longstanding pet projects: the SPOT watch. The writing's been on the wall for some time; the applications and content available to the watches haven't been updated in ages, and indeed, the entire line of Abacus Smart Watch 2006 models — the only type being recently offered — has been discontinued and out of stock for a few months. For what it's worth, MSN Direct's program manager is quick to note that the underlying technology most certainly isn't going away."
The pocket version of this watch made by Handspring ten years ago still works and I like it. I alwasy wanted the screen and battery to be bigger not smaller. Changing my watch battery every few years is painful enough that I'd never do it every few months. Getting M$ involved would probably rob the thing of my favorite features like datebook+. Good riddance to a bad idea.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It was a pay service for your watch when one's cell phone does most those features and more.
Sorry, but that isn't a SPOT watch in the link, but a Fossil watch running PalmOS. Similar idea, but most certainly not from Microsoft.
Yaz.
What now?
If they had billed it as "a watch so awesome you'll want to hide it up your ass for your descendants" they might have gotten better sales.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
They must have found a really good exfoliant or concealer.
Summation 2
I'd always thought that this was sort of a fun idea, but it always seemed like it cost a lot, the watches were huge, and the feature set was never that amazing. Ultimately... if you have a cell phone on you 24/7 that's capable of doing everything the watch can - why buy the watch? I've stopped wearing a watch for this very reason.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
I always liked the idea, but I wasn't about to buy it from Microsoft.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The thing about all these devices that I never understood is who is the market? Business types who have smartphones? Geeks who have.... smartphones?
Personally I prefer my watch to be mechanical (automatic of course) as that demonstrates decent engineering, and when I want to know the weather, traffic, news or whatever I pull out my phone.
Seriously, what is the point?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Reminds me of the classic Timex Datalink watchs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink
I had the original model, the one with the "Listen to the light" printed on binary on the wrist strap.
Both had the problem of good technology with way to small of an interface. Some day watch designers will realize that a watch size is about big enough for an interface for... a watch. And not much more.
I'll stick with my analog watch, thanks.
Microsoft is the computer industry's Dr. Death. Here are other things from Microsoft that are dead, or declared eventually dead:
Death date set: Windows XP
Declared dead: FoxPro database programming language
Dead soon: PlaysForSure was corporate-speak for "we will kill it and destroy access to your music any time we want". Apparently the reason Microsoft executives wanted to reassure buyers by saying "Plays for Sure" is that they knew it was not sure.
This post demonstrates one of the most annoying habits of Slashdot, which is its tendency to assume that everyone already knows what the hell the article is referring to in the first place. WTF is a SPOT watch? Has it been discussed on Slashdot before? Sure, it's easy to Google it but would it kill the editors to add a link to a description or a prior article?
How tiny is that screen? I think it is tending towards the infamous Dilbert 'Internet Ring' - an ultra-portable PDA that would let you surf the internet - one character at a time.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Someone was still making those? That's like finding out that Microsoft Bob was still on store shelves. Or the same way I felt when I found out that Palm had stores.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
I own one of these watches and they are great. It synched with the atomic clock, changed time automatically when I change time zones, which is on a regular basis, I can get local weather and info without having to page through some web-site on my cell phone.
Other advantage, different watch faces.
My three year old loves playing with this watch.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
I had a Timex Datalink and it was kind of a cool idea. The real issue I had with it was lack of real choice. It wasn't a generic device capable of fitting my needs, but a device made only to be used with a specific product, microsoft's mail package. It.
I don't know much about the SPOT, but I'm assuming it is a pseudo successor to the datalink.
Now, if they could make a cell phone you wear on a watch band, with no built in headset, and designed to use a bluetooth headset, that would be cool.
If they designed a watch band device with an open API and programmability, that would be pretty cool. You could make it do just about anything. Hell, you could put a pretty powerful computer on your wrist and use bluetooth keyboards and the X Window system for display over wireless. You wouldn't be able to play games, but you could do everything else.
Looks like you can still activate a watch if you have one. http://direct.msn.com/
"Microsoft discovers something else they are not good at"
It seems hardly novel enough to qualify as news.
Not a full-blown PDA, but I've found that for managing some simple calendar things, occassions, alarms, etc, you can't beat the Timex Datalink USB watches.
I may or may not have a cell phone or PDA with me at any given time. I always have my watch, though, and all of my contacts, schedule, etc are on it.
"Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!â"One; two: why, then 'tis time to do't."
See SPOT die.
Already exists in a few forms. Bluetooth pairs between watch and phone to ring and/or show you caller ID. Slick, if you keep your phone someplace inconvenient (backpack, briefcase, etc.) or pulling your phone out would be rude. The one I saw (google://abacus mobilewear) only paired with a few phones, but the idea's the thing.
I own an Abacus 2006. I like it a lot. The customizable faces were neat, and the sports/weather/traffic/movie stuff came in handy more often than you'd think. Headlines pushed to your wrist were good if you're that guy who has to be the first to know when the pope dies or something. I was -just- looking for a replacement for it (I'd developed an allergy to the FM antenna it receives data on) when I saw this story.
Anybody got a recommendation for something nerdy that I haven't already seen on ThinkGeek?
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
I own one of those watches as well, and I will be sad to see the technology go away. These watches had four significant shortcomings;
1) Coverage - SPOTty coverage outside of major cities. They need to be something that is as universal as a pager.
2) Watch quality - The watch that I own is the third one after the first two died a very premature death. Microsoft should have had Casio and Timex on board with devices not the likes of Fossil.
3) Price - Even though the cost was minimal, there WAS an annual fee to be paid. This should have been an ad-based service as I doubt that it would be difficult to cover the costs of the system with ads that are delivered to a user's wrist.
4) Lack of a hack - when techno users can easily hack and improve a system (especially something as geek-oriented as a SPOT Watch) the more likely they are to take it up with enthusiasm.
Well, here's to SPOT...may he live on and come back better, stronger, smaller and more accessible in 2.0
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.
MS has a beta out for the Windows Smart phone version of this service. However they still have not yet launched a version that will work on PcoketPC's and Windows Phones that have a touch screen (yes that's right the demo only works on smart phones without touchscreens that use hard buttons for navigation).
What an amazing example of dropping the ball by being unable to transition without gaps to a new platform that you also design/own.
I expect Google to overtake them soon with a similar client application.
Of course it just goes to illustrate that windows CE should have had this service / client since the version 6 release for any kind of competition with the iphone.
not if you can make them pay a second (or third or ...) time.
That could be a Cash Cow, for the indigent parts of a struggling company.
I think it's quite funny that you complain about the lock-in on the Sony-Ericsson and then state that you plan to buy an iPhone.
- Treo user
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It's sort of cool. I tap on a link on the map and it shows me where the nearest gas stations are with the latest prices. It also shows the movie times for the nearest movie theaters and local weather. It's inherently an "embedded" type of technology - a feature of something rather than a product on its own. I can't imagine wearing one of those watches.
The allergy or the antenna? :)
Allergy: Don't know - haven't seen a doc about it yet. Just happened one day, after I'd worn the watch for more than a year. Now I get a red itchy rash from it if I wear it overnight. It only happens on the part of me that touches the wristband (the antenna) and not on the part that touches the watch itself. Maybe it's an RF burn? Seems unlikely, given that I wore it for a long time before it happened... but that's why I'm a BSE and not an MD.
Antenna: It's coated in rubber, sits underneath the metal band (photos at spotstop.com in the review of the SW2006) and receives data like the new GM car radios do - encoded inaudibly in the transmission. MS contracts (contracted?) with major-market stations to put this signal on their airwaves. If you dig into the watch status screen, it'll tell you which station is sending it out. Don't have it on me (figuratively or literally) or I could give you the Detroit carrier.
Hope I satisfied your curiosity. Let me know if you need more.
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
I remember seeing these, thinking they were geeky but kinda' cool. Supposedly they ran a tiny implementation of .NET, and MS was going to release and SDK for it, but never did. Reminded me of the Java Decoder Ring in that sense (except they actually released an SDK). I had one and it was very cool and very useless. Lost it though. Oh well.
Not bad, but a little expensive. According to this, the battery lasts a week and has it's own wall wart. I suppose you could charge it up at night, like you do your cell phone and the limited display area is responsible for that good battery life.
Do you get a lot of use out of it without a matching earbud? My first thought was, "If I get a call I actually want to deal with, I'm going to have to pull the phone out anyway." An earbud would take care of that problem but that adds even more to the $400 cost of the watch. Was the $400 worth it to begin with?
Can you make it work with a Neo1973? The device is capable of much more than Sony gave it. It could do everything the Spot does and more if it would really talk to a smart phone. The Neo1973 also takes care of privacy issues - I'd never put my contact information into a non free phone hooked up to companies that are asking for immunity to wiretapping crimes.
What i'd really love to have is a wristwatch that simply 'speaks' bluetooth, and lets me remote-control any compliant cell phone i have in my pocket. Additionaly, (and that's the catch), it would have to relay the phone's display onto it's own display, so i could use it to rudimentary surf the web, read SMS, use J2ME apps, etc. I wonder when this kind of interchangeable modularization will at last happen: the cell-phone will be the computing and communications module, the watch (or a micro-tablet-pc-like-thing) the display module, the headset the audio module, etc. It really doesn't sound so hard to implement (although i dont know of a bluetooth profile that could forward the display in an efficient manner), and this would IMHO really revolutionize the way that people could use mobile tech.
That's pretty slick! All they need is to make an iPhone compatible version and then I'll know what I want for Christmas this year!
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Many of my friends have urged me to run and some independent citizens have started Draft_Hal_For_Pontif.com, but I haven't decided at this point.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Please run for Pope Hal!
PS I'm not a sockpuppet or anything.
--
X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*
Watches are good for telling the time/day/date, and keeping track of time.
They are invaluable if you are cooking things, and need to time several dishes cooking times. Or need to keep track of how late you stay out for lunch. Or how long you barbecue ribs, chicken, etc. How late or early you're running for an appointment.
Cell phones, etc. don't cut it for that usage. And all that other data stuff is just extra cruft that gets in the way of what Watches are good for:
Timekeeping, what time is it, and how long you've been doing something.
The best functions are analog watches with diver's type rotating bezels. It's dead simple and easy to use. You can see at a glance how much more time is left and how much time you've spent.
Second best are digital watches. They're more precise but lack the "how much time" at a glance that analog watches give you.
Casio makes good and cheap analog and digital watches. Seiko's diving watches (analog) are superb along with Bulova's. Though both being self-winding need resetting to time every day or so (lose/gain time). Swiss Army makes quartz analog watches that are great also, though they'll require $$$ battery replacement by a dealer who can keep them water-tight.
You really can't go wrong with Seiko or Bulova.
MS just made something that no one really wanted to buy in any big numbers. Since the watch function came second not first.
Yeah, that's going to be useful. Thank God they stopped this. I wonder how long Zune will last.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Microsoft is the computer industry's Dr. Death. Here are other things from Microsoft that are dead, or declared eventually dead: Death date set: Windows XP Declared dead: FoxPro database programming language Dead soon: PlaysForSure was corporate-sp
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