The Gadgets Page

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.

By subscribing to the MSN direct service, you can customize information that you’d like the watch to receive, such as news, weather, sports scores, and stocks. By far the most powerful feature of the watch is its ability to receive your upcoming appointments from Outlook and to receive personal messages sent to you from MSN Messenger users.

The MSN Direct Watch is the first device to incorporate Microsoft’s “Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT)” which is essentially just customized web content delivered directly to the user.

Quality

The watch is about as durable as any sports watch in physical quality. The rubber strap is bulky but strong, and incorporates the radio antenna. The clasp mechanism is definitely not going to come off accidentally. The watch incorporates a very bright backlight.

The strangest thing about the watch is the fact that it has to be recharged pretty much daily. The display, backlight, radio, and animations take up enough power that the designers didn’t even attempt to run it off a normal button cell. Rather, you place the watch on its cradle every night, and the watch is charged my morning. Because the charger technology uses a magnetic coil charger, there are no contact pads to line up or cords to plug in–you just place the watch on the charging cradle and the backlight comes on to confirm that it’s being charged. The well-done nature of the charger makes up for the fact that the watch has to be charged in the first place, and it hasn’t been a problem for me. I suspect that the models that require a corded charger would be bothersome, however. The watch will run for about three days between charges and will shut off when it’s too low to operate.

The network has always provided strong signal everywhere I’ve been, but I haven’t traveled much lately. You should check the coverage maps at direct.msn.com before you purchase to make sure that your home is covered if you don’t live in a large city.

One thing that has to be mentioned in the quality section is the fact that the watch has strangely rebooted on me two or three times in the four months that I’ve been using it. I’ll notice that there’s nothing on the display, press a few buttons, and then watch the thing go through a boot process. The time will be corrected in a few minutes as the watch receives its time signal, and everything is fine after that. I’m not sure what causes it to happen, but so far it hasn’t been a significant problem.

Usability

The watch is quite easy to use, functioning much like any digital watch. You can select from about twelve different watch faces (which differ from model to model, so be sure to check out the faces before you choose a model) and switch between the various modes quite easily. There is a light button, a mode button, “page up” and “page down” buttons, and an enter/activate button. They get the job done pretty easily and are no problem to use.

It’s important to note that the watch only receives information—you can’t respond to messages or add calendar information on the watch. Combined with a cell-phone, this isn’t as much of a limitation as you’d think. Think of the watch as a pager with a nice screen and you’ll understand the functionality.

Flipping through the modes is slightly annoying because you can easily miss a mode and have to go all the way through the modes you’ve got on the watch to get back to it. The basic modes are Time and Messages, with additional modes for Weather, News, Calendar, Diversions, Horoscopes, Stocks, Lottery, and Sports. The modes correspond to channels of information you can subscribe to using the my.msn.com webpage:

• Time is synchronized to the U.S. Naval Observatory’s atomic clock, so the watch never needs to be set. It even picks up your time zone from the radio transmitter so you don’t have to worry about that. In the time mode you can also change watch faces, and receive downloadable watch faces to customize and change the look of your watch over time.
• The Messages mode is essentially a paging service that operates from MSN Messenger. Your friends (but no your own account, oddly enough) can choose to send you a message from a special menu item in MSN Messenger. That feature is okay, but the protocol used to send the message is trivially easy to hack and includes no authentication features, so I expect to see a slew of interesting things such as email forwarders and alerters coming out from hackers soon.
• Weather is from the airport closest to your home address and includes cool things like a UV Index that you can use to determine how likely you are to get sunburned, Barometric pressure, and a three-day forecast. Even the best sensor watches can’t give you that.
• The Calendar is, in my opinion, the most useful feature of the watch. By downloading a plug in for Microsoft Outlook, you can send your next eight appointments directly to your watch. If you’ve scheduled to be alerted about the appointment in Outlook, the watch will alarm and will count down to the appointment on the watch face. For people on the go, this is better than a PDA and it’s been the reason why I’m addicted to the watch despite it’s geeky looks.
• News is pretty much what you’d expect: You can select 10 news providers such as Reuters, AP, MSNBC, and ABC News from a list of about thirty to send a rotating set of 20 news items. They’re limited to a headline and a paragraph, but for the most part, that’s all you really need. It’ll give you something to do when you have five minutes to kill, and if you’re a news junky, you’ll love it. Sports and stocks work the same way—choose your teams or your companies, and get real-time updates throughout the day.
• Diversions consists of simple trivia delivered to your watch, such as a word of the day, this date in history, etc. It is, by definition, pretty trivial. Horoscopes and Lottery are also exactly what you’d expect.

Similar Models

• Abacus Wrist Net Round ($129—best value)
• Fossil Dick Tracy ($199—cheesy plastic case)
• Fossil Wrist Net Round ($179—model reviewed)
• Fossil Wrist Net Square ($179)
• Suunto N3 ($349—Sports watch styling, charge via USB cable)
• Tissot High-T ($699—touch screen rather than physical buttons, charge via USB cable)

Conclusion

It’s big, it’s geeky, and it has become an indispensable part of my daily wear, displacing my much cooler and more expensive Citizen. If you’re an avid Outlook scheduler, you need this watch. There’s nothing more to say about it.

If you’re not, then it’s a moderately interesting sports watch that you have to pay $60/year to actually use for anything but the time and remember to charge. Once there are a few email forwarders that work for it, I might update that opinion, but I just can’t imagine being addicted enough to news, stocks, and sports enough to wear a watch that you have to charge daily.