Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
DAVE GUSSOWThe "Smart Personal Objects Technology" watch offers snippets of streaming information for a monthly fee.
Technology has transformed the wristwatch from a mere timepiece into a multitasking gadget, with models adding MP3 music players, digital cameras, voice recorders, personal digital assistants and Global Positioning System receivers.
Now, Microsoft is offering a watch that promises to deliver a world of information to your wrist. Wrist Net from MSN Direct turns a watch into an information center with news, weather, stocks, messages and a personal calendar.
The idea seems much better than the execution.
In an interactive era, it's pretty skimpy info. News is barely more than headlines. Instant messages can be received (only through MSN Messenger) but not answered. The calendar synchs to a PC only, not a Macintosh. If you want to change your data choices, you must do it at a computer.
With competition from cell phones and Wi-Fi wireless gadgets, which offer better ways to do the same things, the question for Microsoft is, to borrow from an old song: Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?
Bill Gates apparently does, because the SPOT watch (Smart Personal Objects Technology) is one of his pet projects. He told USA Today that watches are only the first gadgets to have SPOT. In the future, it could be included on alarm clocks, key rings and other devices, and information could be expanded to include traffic reports and alerts.
Let's start with the basics. The watch costs $130 to $300 from Microsoft partners Fossil and Suunto. There's even a Fossil model called the Dick Tracy, though unlike the comic strip gadget of yore, it doesn't work as a walkie-talkie.
I tested the $130 Abacus Smart Watch. It has a 1.25-inch liquid crystal display, a rubbery watchband that was difficult to adjust for my wrist size, a metal catch that also serves as the antenna (even as it digs into your wrist), and five buttons for controls.
This is not a watch you take out of the box and pop on your wrist. Instead, you put it on a charger for six to eight hours to get it ready. MSN Direct says a charge will last up to four days, but I had it on the charger every other day.
Next comes the required registration, done online at MSN Direct (direct.msn.com). Users can choose to pay $9.95 a month for the service or $59 for a year. The menu guides you through choices for news, sports, stocks, weather, messages and calendar.
While the watch quickly showed the correct time, set automatically by the service, the promised Welcome message didn't appear after several hours.
Wrist Net is available in the top 100 markets, but boundaries of the service map for the Tampa Bay area cut through Palm Harbor, where I live and work. So I wondered whether I was too close to the line to receive the signal, which is transmitted over unused FM frequencies.
If you leave the coverage area, the watch will function as a clock but won't display data. Once you return to a coverage area, it apparently will automatically reset.
I went back to the Web site on my home PC. The site had a user-friendly help function (except when it came time to cancel the service, which took some digging).
A second attempt to connect worked. Then I played, and got bored pretty darn fast. I'm not a fan of reading Web information and text messages on a cell phone's small screen. The watch is even smaller, and frequently pushing buttons to see the next snippet became annoying.
I set the watch to rotate information, so I would get at least news headlines and weather without having to fiddle with the buttons. It takes a little practice to figure out which button to push if you want more than the headline. But I never did figure out how to turn off the beeping on the hour that annoyed my wife.
The most fun was changing the watch's virtual face. It had choices ranging from a traditional look with numbers or Roman numerals to some very modern designs. Big numbers, little numbers, circles, you name it.
I haven't worn a watch in years. Once my initial curiosity was satisfied, I found myself ignoring the streaming information. Co-workers had "gee-whiz" reactions to the new gadget - until I mentioned the costs.
The idea of having to recharge a watch, much less carrying yet another piece of electronic equipment when I'm on the road, gives me a chill.
It's also hard to imagine what Version 2 of this service could add that would make it worthwhile, even with Gates pushing it. Only time will tell. . .
- Dave Gussow can be reached at gussow@sptimes.com or 727 771-4328.