The Gadgets Page

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.