It’s safe to say that the Dick Tracy radio watch concept has bitten the dust, mainly because no-one with a jot of sanity would use it. That doesn’t mean the dream of the gadget timepiece is dead though – Seiko has just unveiled this Bluetooth beauty for connecting to your mobile.
We’ve been watching Seiko’s project with a geeky eye for some time now. It was first mooted back in 2001, when Bluetooth was being touted for use in every electronic device, then re-appeared three years later as ‘The Phatch’.
Luckily for the watch’s street cred, that moniker’s been dropped for this first working prototype. So, how’s it work? Simple: all you do is tune the smart timepiece into your Bluetooth phone, and it’ll display handy info like the battery life, network signal strength and whether you have any new messages.
Install the included software on your phone, and the ex-Phatch will show you the subject and sender of the received SMS or phone call, and alert you with a ringtone or vibration too.
Considering that all nerd watches – we refer you to NHJ’s now defunct TV watch and Casio’s old calculator timepieces – have been chunky wrist-bricks, Seiko’s effort also deserves a gold star for its smart design.
We’re still hoping for some extra features by its early 2007 launch though. If it could connect to our smartphone and serve up calendar alerts or even news bulletins from the web, we’ll be throwing our Nixon Rotologs under the next oncoming bus. More news when we get it.
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