The Gadgets Page

I’ve never seen anyone complain about this, but I used to have a devil of a time with heart rate monitors. I would strap them around my chest, but I usually wouldn’t get an accurate reading until I was dripping wet with sweat. I tried wetting the contacts with water, but it didn’t seem to do much good.

A few weeks ago, I got my answer from a Black Eyed Peas song. I happened to be running and frustrated with my heart rate reading when the song, “Disco Club,” came on my random mix. The lyric that helped me was, “Rub it on your belly like an ultrasound.” They usually use some product like KY Jelly or Astroglide with ultrasound devices to get a better reading. I thought that it might work for my heart rate monitor.

The next time I exercised, I applied a thin coating of Astroglide to the contacts of the heart rate monitor. From the moment I put it on, I got an accurate reading. No more frustration while I’m waiting to get sweaty enough to get a correct reading.

“Well there’s this one…” is what I would hear every time I walked into a watch shop asking for a good looking digital watch for a woman. No matter which features I asked for, they would always pull out this one. It started to bug me after a while because I would specifically ask for a stopwatch, yet this is the first watch they would bring out. That’s because it was the only watch they had to bring out.

This watch has some great features. The date displays with the time. There is a light, so I can read it at night. It looks better than some bright pink plastic watch. Oh, and it has an alarm. What it doesn’t have is what made me have no use for it. There is no stopwatch, no countdown timer and no dual time. I could give up one of these three things, but not all three.

This watch is great if you need to know the time and date. If you want to measure time in any other manner, however, you’re out of luck.

If you have been searching for a good-looking digital watch that is also functional, this one fits the bill. I own this watch, except mine is the negative display version. I have owned it for a couple of years now and I thought it had died a horrible death, which was why I was looking for a new one. It turned out that the jeweler that I took the watch to for a battery replacement was incompetent or gave me dead batteries. This watch has two batteries, so when it comes time to replace them, do it yourself. It will just break a jeweler’s brain.

The cool thing about this watch is how functional it is. It displays the date and day with the time. It has a dual time function, so when we go to Las Vegas, all I have to do is hold down one button and suddenly, my watch is on Vegas time. It has a stopwatch. When you put it in stopwatch mode, the chronograph will be counting right with your time in the spot where the date used to be. The same is true for the countdown timer and alarms. The light will turn on every time you press a button, which is kind of bad for battery life, but great when compared to so many women’s watches, which don’t have a light at all.

Now, the uncool features. It is not an inuitive watch to learn to use. You really need to read the directions to figure out how to set it. Keep the book that comes with it and guard it with your life because you’ll need it. On the back of the watch, there are little indicators that try to jog your memory about the function of the four (nearly invisible) buttons. Just be careful. If your idiot jeweler puts the back on backwards, the indicators will be wrong.

I have yet to find a watch better looking or more functional than this for women and I have been searching for a couple of years now. I’m almost tempted to buy another one as a backup just in case the jeweler REALLY screws up mine next time I need a new battery.

This watch (Casio – LA11WB1A) was around when I worked at K-Mart in the late Eighties. I remember selling one to a nurse who wanted a practical watch that would do everything she needed during her busy day. This one more than filled her bill. All she really needed was the seconds displayed. Casio is still making it in three designs: black (pictured), silver and gold. It’s nearly the perfect digital watch.

Features:

• Time and seconds displayed
• Date
• Stopwatch
• Alarm
• Pre-set countdown timers (1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 20 and 30 minute timers)
• Hourly chime

Tragically Missing Features:

• Light
• Date displayed on different screen instead of with the time
• Cleaner face design (remove the black and writing, leaving more room for the digital screen and maybe a date)

This would be my watch of choice if it had a light. I could overlook the pre-set timers and the lack of the date displayed with the time, but I need to be able to see what time it is when it’s dark. I actually owned the gold version when I was in high school. I broke two bands before I finally lost it to the third band (fell off my arm unnoticed and lost forever).

In my search for the perfect digital women’s watch, Casio has come out ahead of all the other brands. This watch has been gracing the arms of women all over the nation for twenty years. What do they expect us to do at night?

After looking on the Internet for it, I realized that the medium isn’t ready for watch shopping yet. I can’t tell the size of the watch from the tiny thumbnails that they provide. Las Vegas sports much more shopping opportunities than I have in Salt Lake City, so I was hopeful for the Labor Day weekend. Maybe I would find my watch.

Here is what I want:

• A beautiful watch
• Women’s watch
• Digital
• Metal case and band
• Time and Date on the display at the same time
• Stopwatch
• Countdown Timer
• Light
• I would also like Dual Time, but I’m willing to give that up

I want a watch that is pretty, feminine and useful. Those sparkly watch hands on my Citizen EcoDrive are pretty, but they don’t tell me much information. I want more from my wrist-top computer. I want it to be useful AND good looking, and I’m willing to drop a lot of money on this purchase.

That’s why I was hopeful for Las Vegas. They have so many luxury and designer stores there. I was sure that TAG Heuer or Tissot would have what I was looking for. I just needed to find it.

After looking at every watch store in the Las Vegas area, we came up worse than empty. I was crabby with so many of the clerks, but the snooty lady at the biggest watch shop was the only one who deserved it.

“I don’t think this Nike looks good enough to be a dress watch.” I said reluctantly. It was only $80 and I could have bought it for fun, but it wasn’t any better than the $7 watch on my wrist.

I saw the clerk roll her eyes. She said in a thick accent, which I suspected was fake, “If you want a nice dress watch, you won’t find it in digital. Buy a Citizen.”

“I have a Citizen. It takes me an extra five seconds to tell time with it. I want digital with a nice metal band.”

“What you want is too big for a women’s watch.”

“This watch is digital and it’s small.” I held up the $7 Armitron. It has all the functions that I want. It’s just ugly. It looks like a sport watch. “If they just put the innards of this into a nice watch, then I would have what I want.”

“If you want a dress watch, you need to buy a nice brand. I have one with a stopwatch.”

“You do? It’s a digital?”

“No, it’s not a digital. It’s an analog stopwatch.”

I didn’t say anything else. I realized that the woman is used to selling watches to fat old women who are more interested in how many diamonds are on the face. It’s a shame, too. I was willing to drop a load if I could only find what I wanted. I’ll probably end up buying a Suunto. If it has to be ugly at least it can tell me the temperature and predict the weather.

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.