Reviews
Fossil
Wrist PDA
Your Palm is on your wrist
Fossil,
popular maker of more kinds of watches than anyone can count,
has done something that a few years ago would have been unthinkable.
In fact, they've been working on this product for about four years÷a
Palm in the form factor of a wristwatch. While some may give the
Wrist PDA very high scores for its ãgeek factorä alone, and it
does get the job done within its limitations, it has some serious
design compromises, and after wearing one for a week, my verdict
is: it's not quite ready for prime time.
What's
in the box (or can, rather):
Fossil retails the Wrist PDA in one of its typically snazzy tins÷this
one is about the size of a pound coffee can and contains:
ð
The Fossil Wrist PDA with Li-ion battery
ð A USB cable
ð An AC charging adapter
ð A tiny Wrist PDA user's guide
ð A CD with the Palm Desktop software, manuals, and WordComplete
for Jot
ð An extra stylus
ð Wallet-sized Jot cheat sheet cards
Specifications
The Wrist PDA's specs are a leap backwards a few years in Palm
technology. A little better than my first Handspring Visor.
ð PalmOS V4.1
ð Motorola Dragonball Super VZ at 66Mhz
ð 8MB (RAM), 4MB (Flash) ö approximately 7.7Mb RAM available (no
expansion possibilities, no card slot) ð 160x160 pixels in 16
shades of gray on a 1" square touch screen with a dim blue electroluminescent
backlight button
ð Standard PalmOS ROM apps including Address Book / Contacts,
Date Book, To Do List, Memo Pad, Calculator, Jot handwriting recognition,
Prefs, Skills (teaches you how to use its features), Security,
and Watch faces ÷ eleven of them.
ð Drop down menu system, battery power meter, contrast slider
The
Wrist PDA's physical form is that of a huge, 1/2" thick, very
imposing and impressive case that looks like it's carved out of
a solid block of stainless steel, a little over 3 ounces, with
a permanently mounted, and very stylish combination rubber and
leather buckled wrist strap. This strap is long, even around my
relatively fat wrist; I could wear it comfortably and still have
a few notches left, so it should fit the wrist of a lumberjack.
It feels hefty, and it looks good. How it feels on your own wrist,
only you can say, and I'd recommend you find a store with an open
demo unit you can try on, before you shop around or order one
online. You may love it or you may hate it.
A
tour around the watch:
Physical buttons and ports are minimalist compared to standard
Palms. Up top center is the IRDA window, for beaming and receiving
data with other Palms. On the right side of the case are three
black plastic buttons of decent size with fairly good tactile
feel: page up, a three-way combination up-down-enter rocker switch,
and a page down button. On the lower left side is a combination
back and backlight button. Just above that is a recessed metal
reset button, and finally, a mini-USB/charging port covered by
a hinged, black rubber plug. This port is used both for HotSyncing
the Wrist PDA with your desktop or laptop, and for charging its
battery. The three-way rocker is slightly mushy-feeling at times;
sometimes I had to push it more than once for the ãenterä function
to register. How long these buttons will last is anyone's guess.
By
shrinking a Palm to the size of a watch, albeit a stylish but
massive one, Fossil has obviously put a lot of thought behind
the ergonomics and designed the watch so that any application,
and a lot of navigation can located and launched with the four
buttons on the case. But when you need to enter data into an app,
or select menu items, the screen is so tiny that unless you have
pointed fingernails you'll need a stylus. And the Wrist PDA comes
with the smallest stylus I've ever seen: a tiny swivel-hinged
half metal, half plastic affair, that lives in the strap's buckle.
It snaps into its tiny slot securely, but should you lose it,
remember where you put that spare. A better solution might be
to carry a combination pen/stylus in your pocket or purse, as
fishing the tiny stylus out of its slot is a pain when the strap
is buckled on your wrist.
Initial
setup÷learning the watch
The first thing you'll do after taking the watch out of its tin
home is fish out the cables and AC adapter and charge it up. This
takes 2-3 hours, but you can start setting it up and play with
it while it's charging. Upon first power-up, you'll see a typical
Palm Welcome screen where, using the stylus, you calibrate its
digitizer. Due to the tiny screen, it's critically important that
you tap the targets exactly in the center, or the watch will never
respond accurately to stylus taps. A 1-inch screen offers little
space for tapping. If you get it wrong, you can just go into the
Welcome app, or Prefs, and calibrate again until you get it right.
If
you already own a Palm filled with your personal contacts and
memos, you can just beam them over to the watch. Since PalmSource
coded Palm Desktop so that only one version can be on a desktop
or laptop, installing the version that comes with the watch would
have replaced/downgraded the newer version I'm already using,
so I just gave the watch a unique owner name in Prefs, and did
a HotSync. Palm Desktop can sync with multiple Palms, but each
one you sync must have a unique owner name, or things get really
messy and confused. If the watch is your first Palm, go ahead
and install Palm Desktop from the included CD.
Since
the Wrist PDA has no backup or storage card, syncing to your computer
is essential. If its battery conks out, you'll lose all your personal
data, and with a 3-4 day battery life with casual use, it's important
to keep it charged. I beamed FileZ over to it, an excellent, free
program provides much better battery and memory meters than those
built into PalmOS V4.1.
Before
you use your Wrist PDA, you'll want to learn what each of its
watch-like buttons does. The manual is small enough to tuck into
a shirt pocket, so you can refer to it if you get befuddled. Read
through the whole thing at least once, because this is a Palm
that operates like no other.
The
Wrist PDA's Prefs let you set a time-out period after which the
Palm apps screen either blanks out, or is replaced by a digital
watch face. ãWatchä is a Palm app in the Wrist PDA's ROM. I thought
12 different watch faces was a cool idea, until I saw them. Cycling
through the choices÷some ãanalogä, some digital, some easy to
read, some completely goofy ÷ I was stunned to see that not a
single one of them had a sweep second hand, digital seconds display,
or alarm function. What!?
I
read through the manual again. I tried all the buttons and menus
and Prefs÷ no luck. Finally, it took a call to Fossil to learn
that none of the watch displays show seconds at all. On a $250
watch with a computer in it? Unbelievable. Fossil told me that
due to the limits of the battery, they designed the Wrist PDA
to only update the watch face once a minute. Now I've owned plenty
of cheap digital watches that run on tiny button batteries that
last for years, and I've never seen one without a seconds display,
but there you go. Even without a seconds display this watch on
steroids deserves much better watch faces, and Fossil should hire
some designers to whip up prettier ones and make them available
to download.
The
battery is the #1 roadblock in what otherwise could have been
a killer little gizmo. It's the reason you get 16 shades of gray
instead of color, why it has to be recharged so often, why the
blue Indiglo backlight is so dim (I laughed when I read the User's
Guide which said it could be used as a flashlight.) Although the
display is crisp, legible (if you have good eyesight) and contrasty
outdoors or in bright light, in a dimly lit room, it's almost
impossible to use, and the backlight is barely adequate. Same
goes for the watch's sound features. In the General preferences
you can turn sounds on and off, but there are no volume levels,
and its single tone ãchirpä is audible in a quiet room, but not
in a noisy environment or outdoors.
Again,
these compromises built into the Wrist PDA are, by Fossil's own
admission, a direct result of the battery size. What puzzles me
is how the manual refers many times to the PDA ãsleepingä while
in watch mode. You'd think it would take minimal power to update
LCD watch faces once a second and provide a more functional watch-mode
experience.
Since
the PDA is on your wrist, instead of in your hand, it's been set
to have a very slight response delay to avoid accidental screen
taps. This is another compromise with both good and bad ramifications.
Text
entry using Jot is easy. The screen is divided into two parts.
You scrawl lower case on the left, numerals on the right, and
upper case in the middle. Jot's paradigm for turning strokes into
text is much more logical than Graffiti on a device with such
a tiny screen, and it works well. There are even standard Palm
OS pop-up keyboards, but they're so small, you'll never use them.
For serious text entry, you might want to invest in a compact
portable IR keyboard.
The
Fossil Wrist PDA is not waterproof, or even water-resistant. You'll
have to take it off every time you wash your hands, do the dishes,
take a shower, go swimming, or risk it getting rained on.
Connectivity
to the outside world?
The Wrist PDA has no way to connect and pull down data from the
outside world, except through the USB cable to your computer,
and an offline
browsing service like AvantGO. There's no email, no Web browser,
no SMS, no Bluetooth, no cell network connectivity, or even any
way to connect to an IR-enabled phone. For $100 less, Fossil sells
an MSN Direct watch that grabs news, sports, weather and so on,
wirelessly but that one requires a data service charge.
I
wonder who would pay $250 for a PalmOS watch, fill it with hundreds
of names and phone numbers, and not also carry a cell phone. Even
older ãdumbä cell phones hold hundreds of numbers. Are you going
to leave your phone home, look up numbers on the watch, and then
try to find a pay phone? It's a mystery as to whom Fossil sees
as the target customer for the Wrist PDA. Kids would love it.
Kids would also destroy it in no time at all.
Halfway
there
Without question, the Fossil Wrist PDA is a stylish piece of technology.
But as good as it looks, its functionality is hampered by the
limitations of its guts, which all relate to the battery's power,
or lack of it. Like a cell phone with an accelerometer that let
you dial numbers by waving their shapes in the air, my take on
the Fossil Wrist PDA is ãGreat, but why would I want one?ä
Fossil,
please go back to the drawing board. Make one of these with a
bright color, higher resolution screen, newer Palm OS version,
much better watch functions and sounds, and some outside world
connectivity, even if it has to be a bit fatter to hold a better
battery, and I'd swoon. This is a radical new product I really
wanted to like. Its reality fell short of my expectations. This
first version is about halfway there.
ö Harv Laser
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