This Smart Watch has Some Lessons to Learn

Microsoft may be the only company in the world that could have brought the
MSN Direct Smart Watch to market. Having $50 billion in the bank is handy if you
want to take a slightly goofy research project–a wristwatch that receives news
and instant messages and displays your calendar–and turn it into a mass-market
item in less than a year. Last January, Microsoft Chairman William H Gates III
demonstrated a prototype of a data watch, then called Smart Personal Object
Technology. Microsoft Research, working with a tiny radio and processor
developed by National Semiconductor, had found a way to make devices as small as
watches act as one-way pagers, receiving data over part of the FM signal not
used by radio stations.

Microsoft quickly established a product group, lined up Fossil and Finland’s
Suunto as watchmaking and marketing partners, and leased spectrum from FM
stations to provide coverage in most metropolitan areas. But it’s far from
clear to me whether this is a product for which there is a real market or a
technology Microsoft pursued just because it could.

The first smart watches should be in stores in January. Fossil has a version
for $179 and a second bearing its Abacus brand for $129. Suunto, which makes
high-end sports instruments such as dive computers, will offer a $299 Smart
Watch. Buyers also need an MSN Direct subscription: $9.95 a month with 30 days
free, or $59 for a year.

I’m certainly well out of Smart Watch’s target demographic of teens and
twentysomethings. My personal taste in timepieces runs to the thin, elegant
products of Geneva watchmakers. So it’s not surprising that I found wearing
the Fossil Wrist Net watch – which is 1 1/4 inches long, 1 1/2-in. wide, and
nearly a 1/2-in. thick – a bit like having a golf ball strapped to my wrist.
But big watches are fashionable among the younger buyers who have made Fossil
hot.

The idea of a watch communicator has been around at least since the Dick
Tracy comic strip’s wrist radio in the 1940s. But even in an age of
microelectronics that Tracy creator Chester Gould could never have dreamed of,
the design and size of watches imposes some formidable challenges. The Smart
Watch is controlled by five buttons. Those on the left follow the functions of
most electronic watches. The lower button flips through the watch’s
"channels," such as time, choice of watch face, weather, news, and
messages. The button on the upper left turns on a backlight. And the center
button on the right accepts the current selection, sort of like an
"enter" key. Buttons on the right top and bottom move forward and
backward through the items within a category, such as messages, stocks, and news
stories. This all works well enough, but I found manipulating the buttons
clumsy. A bigger drawback is the watch’s need to be recharged every three days
or so–so a trip lasting more than a weekend will require taking a bulky
charger along. I’m not sure a dozen 25-word news items and a handful of stock
quotes is worth the tradeoff.

The feature that makes the most sense to me is the ability to see my Outlook
calendar – appointments and watches are a natural mix. The calendar sync,
along with other choices, such as selecting stock quotes and choosing your home
city for news and weather, is accomplished through the MSN Direct Web site. If
you have Outlook set to give you alarms before meetings, the Smart Watch will
give you the same alerts.

The history of multifunction watches is not a happy one. In the late 1990s,
Timex’ Data Link watch synced contact and calendar information but had little
success beyond the Microsoft campus. More than a year ago, Fossil announced a
Palm watch that is still six months away from release. Microsoft’s money can
get the Smart Watch to market, but its fate is up to the vagaries of youthful
taste.

By Stephen H Wildstrom
in BusinessWeek. Copyright 2004 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc