The Gadgets Page

Welcome to the all-new (but two years old) Gadgets Page. This site launched in October 2003, but we haven’t had as much time to update it as we hoped. We’ve relaunched the site with a new design, new software, and a new focus.

We will now be posting shorter items more frequently, covering topics like these:

• Reviews of gadgets
• Descriptions of new and upcoming gadgets
• Getting the most from your gadgets
• Updates on our long-term experience with the gadgets we own and review
• Questions and answers
• Our thoughts on the industries behind the gadgets

We’re aware there are some other gadget sites out there—we read and enjoy them. But we plan to make this one different in a few ways:

• We have our own style and interests, and we’re trying to create a site for gadget users, not just gadget geeks.
• We’re going to focus on products that are available now (or soon) in the U.S. No offense to those outside the states, but we can’t write about what we can’t see or buy.
• We’ll talk about both old and new gadgets, and encourage you to get the most out of your gadgets rather than replacing them with the hottest new thing every few months.

Please let us know if you have any suggestions, or if there are gadgets or aspects you’d like us to cover. As with all sites, this one will evolve in style and substance as time goes by, and we hope you enjoy it!

—Your authors: Matthew Strebe, Michael Moncur, and Laura Moncur

In my continuing quest to find the perfect digital watch, my interest was piqued by CNET’s look at Microsoft and Fossil’s new SPOT Watches. A few issues prevented the older edition of the SPOT watches from being the right watch for me:

• They were big and chunky.
• They required recharging every day or two.
• Like most people with a cell phone, I had no use for the MSN Direct data feeds that display news, weather, traffic, and other information on the watch face.
• While the watch lets you switch faces to try different looks, none of the options looked good to me—I just want a nice, readable, information-packed display like you’d find on a Timex and instead they’re mostly cheesy show-off faces that serve only to highlight how poor the display resolution is.

I really wanted to like these watches, especially since the new version is one of the best looking digital watches I’ve seen. The new model does address one of my problems: it’s smaller and lighter. It also has six additional faces, but they’re equally silly, as you can see in the pictures at right.

The biggest problem is that the battery requires recharging. CNET says the watch lasted “up to six days” between charges, but that’s still unacceptable to me. I want a watch that lasts a year or two on a battery, and I never want to be without my timepiece because I forgot to charge it.

Once again, Microsoft and Fossil have created an elegant but confused entry into a target market that presumably consists of busy executives who need to keep up with news, traffic, and sports scores but don’t carry a cell phone (which would offer the same data on a much bigger display without the yearly fee) and don’t mind recharging their watch once a week.

The MSN Direct Watch is a bulky digital watch that looks a bit like a sports watch (because of its size and the rubber strap). It has a digital display similar to a cellular phone that can display just about anything, which is utilized to create a number of reasonably interesting watch faces. The faces include various analog or digital displays.

(Continue Reading…)