Wrist Technology
Dec. 2nd, 2002 03:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tugrikI've come to a rather silly, and probably blatantly obvious to other people, discovery about useful gadgets vs. silly gizmos. There are many silly gizmos in the world; I own (or have built) far too many of them. What makes any one of them a useful gadget is how the device (or feature) interfaces with the user. New tech, gee-whiz abilities, or outlandish exercises in scale or power are all great and dandy, but in the end what matters is how naturally the thing works for you. Part of me hates to admit this is true, but it usually is. A simple device that does something in a very native or transparent way is much better than an amazingly endowed device that can do many things, but all of them awkwardly.
Warning: It's 2:30 am, and I can't sleep. Expect this one to be amazingly rambly and with all too much detail. This is to just get me back into the mood for journaling.
One of my bad habits is the acquisition (buy, horsetrade, import, etc) of gizmo-watches. This started when I was an undersized runt of a colt somewhere in early gradeschool when my mom bought me a red-light-up Darth Vader digital watch. It only showed the time when you pressed the button, and it did so in glowing red like an old calculator. I remember having to get a note from the teacher that said I was A-OK with my analog clock-reading skills and it was 'safe' for my mom to give me a digital watch. No, I don't know why this was a big deal either. That watch eventually died a waterlogged death in the washing machine, after much over-use and a few batteries worn out.
The next one was the Watch that Never Was. I was on the farm still, so maybe 4th or 5th grade. We always had the Sears Wishbook each holiday season which I always scampered off with to lust after this or that toy. For me, though, the toys were stereo bits and watches. This was the first time I'd seen a multifunction digital watch. Time, date, alarm, and a chronometer. Oooh. I had no idea that a chronometer was a stopwatch, but I wanted it. I dreamed about owning that watch all year, but it never happened. It mighta helped if I'd told my parents that I wanted it. Whups. :)
Nevada was the next living-spot and I'd finally bought myself one of them fancy multi-ability watches. This one played a 5 note tune that sounded like a one-handed scale practice on a piano, in terrible bleepy buzz-sounds. I'd figured out a chronometer was a stopwatch and that' bummed me out a little. It had a metal band which pinched and pulled arm-hairs. This was to be my one and only metal-banded watch. Hate the things. It was stolen from a locker at the public pool while I was doing cannonballs with friends (this pool was where I earned the nickname Tidal Wave Tor, as this was the point in my life where I swapped from Runt to Biggest Galoot in Class). I was crushed. Losing a loved gadget sucks.
The paper route brought in enough for me to save up and replace the stolen watch with the now-collectable LCD Pac-Man game watch. It had a little joystick and everything, and made the most annoying sounds of any watch I'd ever owned. I never really did like pac-man, though, and ended up trading it to a buddy named Jason Goudie for some bike parts. If I'd only known to keep ahold of it, it's worth about $300 on the collectable markets nowadays. Figures.
A few watches came and went that I'll never remember, until the fateful day I got a DAK catalog while living in Michigan. DAK was kind of a prototype 'Sharper Image' catalog -- but more for the geek-gadget set than the golf-and-business-stuff set. It was run by some marketeer named Drew Alan Kaplan, and thus the name. This was when I was doing my tour-of-duty with the local phone phreak gangs, and was a proud member of the Phido-616's. I remember getting the catalog and opening it up to reveal the wonder inside -- a Casio databank watch with a DTMF generator. It could store 50 names and numbers, and when you held down the lower right hand button you had two seconds to lift the teeny piezo-speaker grille (located just below the watch-face) to the telephone mouthpiece before it would play the DTMF tones and dial the phone. To have this watch amongst phreaker friends was to be a Tech God. I saved paper-route money for a month, and did my first ever mail-order. I watched my mailbox for three solid weeks while the money order cleared at DAK. I loved that watch to death. Literally. It took a full year to give up the ghost. While a Casio, it was no G-shock, and was put to destruction just by the sheer level of use it got. I became skilled at using multiple memory slots to store some of the longer access numbers used in our little endeavors, firing them off in chained shots of little tones. The watch's passing coincided with a few close friends getting hassled during a little thing called 'sundevil', so like many things from that era of my life, I didn't go back for another.
A quick peek on the net shows that DAK is still around. If they still sold that watch I'd get another one, but they don't. Ahwell. :)
From that point on were the days of Casio Goodness. Calculator watches, G-shock 'wrapped around a hockey puck' watches, dual analog-digital ones, my first Altimeter watch, and so forth. Two timex ones slipped in there: one Ironman Triathalon (with that new nifty Indiglo backlight) was a parental gift, and my move to California found me purchasing a Timex/Microsoft 'data bank' that one programmed by pointing at a flickering monitor screen. Oh, and I also tried (but ended up returning) one of their early pager watches. Nothing was too terribly notable, and nothing fit too well. My wrist is big enough in adult life that I always have to put custom bands on things except for the monster G-shock modern ones. The most notable Casio of that period was one that had a thermometer in it. That just made the gadget-lusting part of me absolutely groove. It was wildly inaccurate thanks to body temperature, so it was of no use unless it was off the wrist for a half-hour to temp-stabilize. I'd never do that, though -- that'd mean not wearing it!
One thing that bears mentioning is my forgetfulness of small items. Unless it remains attached to my person or something I use regularly, I will lose it. The reason I didn't lose watches was because I never took them off. Seriously. I wore them sleeping. Showering. Swimming. During football practice (yes, I did that in Jr. high; played center). It got to where that band on my left wrist would have no freckles and lighter skin. If I ever took a watch off it was like this glaring white patch. This is why I never had a fancy watch, and why weak watches didn't survive. It had to be waterproof, tough, and resiliant or it'd die the way I wear watches. This got me a few scoffs from new California-area friends who felt wearing a timepiece was a statement of being 'under the thumb of The Man'; it was hip to be a programmer who had no sense of time and no schedule-keeping responsibility. They missed the point entirely. I didn't wear watches to keep the time. Gaah. You could get the time from anywhere. It was the other features that mattered.
One of the watches I ended up selling was a universal-remote-control watch. It was a 2nd generation model that would actually learn IR codes instead of just repeat ones stored in a preloaded database. While nifty, I'd long since surpassed that level of simple remote functionality and it was just something I couldn't get into. I passed it along to Frang for a good price, and he put it to much amusing use over the years.
Up until this point, all these watches (including the DTMF one) were notably inexpensive. My move to California in the pre-dotbomb time had brought me my first decent paychecks. This led to the purchase of my first two more-pricey watches and sunglasses. (Hmmm. I should do a silly entry on sunglasses too, now that I think about it.)( The first was Casio's new Triple Sensor. Altimeter, thermometer, compass, all in the same watch. It was astounding, for the late/mid-90's. They called it their "Pathfinder". It was huge, clunky, and blatant. You could see someone wearing this monstrosity across a crowded hall. I loved it. Heck, it kept dot-matrix graphs of altitudes over time, with a datalogger feature even! Just insane. It was also tough as nails. I wore and abused this watch for 2.5 years, having the face polished up by a jewler once to get rid of some scratches incurred during a nasty game of Martian Football (I caught the bezel on a protruding screw while getting into the pod at Virtual World). I ended up giving it to my dad, as I'd tired of having the same watch for so long but couldn't bear to see it unused. A year later I got it back from him as I'd missed it, and gave him a nifty Databank Twincept casio in trade -- a nifty new tech that uses multiple layers of liquid-crystal to make multiplane displays. The phone#'s and world-time map 'floated' above the analog hands and real watch face below. Neat -- but not tough enough for my tastes. It suited him well, though. I think he sitll has it.
The 2nd of the priceywatches was the Casio GPS watch, the PAT2GP-1V. It simply doesn't get any geekier than this, folks. The watch re-defines huge. It has a rechargeable Li++ battery and a docking cradle to charge it in, as well as hook it into the computer. A full dot-matrix display. Waypoint memory. It even auto-updates the time/date from the GPS signal, so it was 'atomic accurate' before the radio-listening watches existed. It also worked like butt. It was the worst GPS I'd ever owned. It did actually function, mind you... it just functioned terribly. Much to my amusement, it helped me get a job -- or at least amused the interviewers at the GPS company I now work for. I sitll have this watch, though I broke the band in a way that's hard to repair. If anybody wants a GPS-watch for dirt cheap and can get creative with re-banding it (I broke the hole that holds the pin in place on the body), give me a holler.
The failure of the GPS watch to light my gadgetty fire mixed with the newfound difficulty of wearing a watch under motorcycle gloves snapped me out of watch-having lust for the first time. A few days after getting the job I'm in now, I simply stopped wearing watches. After a year, I had freckles on my left wrist for the first time I can remember, and the skin-tone started to match the rest of my forearm. I still had a time-device in the form of my celphone, sure.. but the watch thing just felt so 'eh...' I even went to buy a nice G-shock cheapie, all blue and big-strapped with a thermometer... wore it for a whopping 2 weeks before putting it aside to never wear again. While Dusty and I were installing new toys on my motorcycle I was digging through the parts-box and found it. I gave it to him since it looked all lonely and he was watchless. He told me he didn't wear watches at work because he was a mechanic and would ruin them. I bet the tough little thing will surprise him. Since I know he reads this thing: Dusty, if you can manage to kill it in daily use, I'll buy you the new one of your choice. Take that as a challenge. :)
At this point I'd moved my celphone tech up to the lovely Nokia 9290. One of its features is the ability to handle digital photographs sent to it via infared. These pictures could then be sent over the net as email, SMS, or kept in the phone for use as a contact-card picture. When someone in your phonebook calls, their picture (if available) pops up on the phone display. A newly released watch, the Casio WQV10, could take uselessly tiny color pictures -- but they were the perfect size for contact card use. Acquiring one of these became a Moral Imperative. They weren't in the US yet, so I had to order it overseas. I found a properly motivated importer from Malaysia and got the watch for 1/3rd of what Sharper Image ended up charging for it upon it's domestic release a month later. Looking back at my own journal entries, this was in June. I used this watch for a good few weeks before I simply stopped wearing it. Part of it was due to the lingering issue of not being able to wear a watch under motorcycle gloves, so I'd forget to put it on once I took it off. Most of the reason was it was simply a sucky timepiece. Seriously. It had zero backlight and the color display was far worse than the much lamented problems with the Gameboy Advance. Reading the time even in good daylight was a challenge.
This brings me now to the current watch. I just somehow felt it was time, once more, to get back into the whole timepiece thing. I missed my longest-worn watch, the Triple-Sensor. Newer versions were out there that supposedly worked even better. I finally found what I wanted in the PAG50 series. Triple-sensor, twincept, G-shock, 100M waterproof, big enough band, the works. There were two models that I couldn't decide between. The cheaper one was battery powered and had phase-of-the-moon and tides on the faceplate. The pricier one was solar powered, and didn't have those functions. I chose the former as I thought having moon-age was nifty -- but after having it a day or so, I realized they traded those features for the altimeter. Given the choice of the two, I'd rather have an altimeter than a moon-phase/tide indicator, really. So I took it back and 'supersized', which the shopkeeper was quite happy to do. I of course chose to do this on the day after thanksgiving, which means for the first time I got to see The First Shopping Day of Christmas up close and personal. Pure hell. Never again.
This watch does everything the previous triple-sensor did, and more. To go down the laundry list, it has an altimeter, barometer, thermometer, compass, stopwatch, count-down timer, alarms, and a datalogger to keep lists of measurements previously taken. It's a twincept: the digital compass appears 1mm or so above the normal watch display, hovering there and turning realtime as you point the watch various directions. It's solar, so needs no batteries. 5 minutes of sunlight or 20 minutes of indoor incandescent light is all it needs to keep fully recharged. A full charge will last 8 months in the dark; longer if you let the watch enter 'sleep mode' when the solar cell senses it's dark out. It's smart about running out of power, too: it'll slowly shut down each power-using feature until only simple timekeeping is left, letting it serve its primary function as long as possible. The face is the size of a silver-dollar, making it both easily readable and right-sized on my big wrists. On a normal person it'd look awkwardly huge, I'm sure.
So... how does this all relate to the title? It's pretty simple really. It's the reason that I'm in love with this new watch, when the last one (the camera watch) went unloved. In the tale of two watches, the one that gets worn is the one that does what you need better than the other.
Of all the watches I've owned, wanted to own, or seen up close and personal... I've finally found something important in a timepiece. Through the menagerie of databanks, cameras, GPS recievers, triple-sensors, twincept multi-layer displays, uber-backlights, and DTMF generators I've worn more technology on my wrist than I want to think about. So what is this one feature that's proven so handy, so natural, so perfectly executed that it stands out amongst all the ones that came before? It's not any of the whiz-bang sensors or feepy bits. Instead, it's the simplest part of the entire watch:
When it's dark and you look at the watch, it lights up.
It's not just that it lights up. It does it perfectly. Elegantly. The motion required to lift the watch and tilt it to peek at the time, sensed by internal micro-accelerometers, automatically triggers the backlight and holds it on for a nicely timed 2 seconds. No other motions seem to set it off. If it's light out, the solar cell lets the watch know, so it won't trigger. This little bit of functionality is so smooth I didn't realize I was using the feature at first. Driving home at night, wondering how late it was, I tilt my wrist and peek out of habit. Crisp, gentle, green-lit numbers clearly state "1:30a". The light turns out just as I turn the wrist to put the hand back on the steering wheel. No button pushing, no squinting.
It Just Works.
The interface to the user couldn't be simpler. The concept is super-easy to describe to someone who might buy it: "When you look at it, it lights up." The internal technology to make this happen, and more importantly make this happen only when it's appropriate to do so is pretty intense. Now I know what I must seek in my future gadget-acquisitions. This level of simple and pure functionality sets a new bar.
Cool.
Warning: It's 2:30 am, and I can't sleep. Expect this one to be amazingly rambly and with all too much detail. This is to just get me back into the mood for journaling.
One of my bad habits is the acquisition (buy, horsetrade, import, etc) of gizmo-watches. This started when I was an undersized runt of a colt somewhere in early gradeschool when my mom bought me a red-light-up Darth Vader digital watch. It only showed the time when you pressed the button, and it did so in glowing red like an old calculator. I remember having to get a note from the teacher that said I was A-OK with my analog clock-reading skills and it was 'safe' for my mom to give me a digital watch. No, I don't know why this was a big deal either. That watch eventually died a waterlogged death in the washing machine, after much over-use and a few batteries worn out.
The next one was the Watch that Never Was. I was on the farm still, so maybe 4th or 5th grade. We always had the Sears Wishbook each holiday season which I always scampered off with to lust after this or that toy. For me, though, the toys were stereo bits and watches. This was the first time I'd seen a multifunction digital watch. Time, date, alarm, and a chronometer. Oooh. I had no idea that a chronometer was a stopwatch, but I wanted it. I dreamed about owning that watch all year, but it never happened. It mighta helped if I'd told my parents that I wanted it. Whups. :)
Nevada was the next living-spot and I'd finally bought myself one of them fancy multi-ability watches. This one played a 5 note tune that sounded like a one-handed scale practice on a piano, in terrible bleepy buzz-sounds. I'd figured out a chronometer was a stopwatch and that' bummed me out a little. It had a metal band which pinched and pulled arm-hairs. This was to be my one and only metal-banded watch. Hate the things. It was stolen from a locker at the public pool while I was doing cannonballs with friends (this pool was where I earned the nickname Tidal Wave Tor, as this was the point in my life where I swapped from Runt to Biggest Galoot in Class). I was crushed. Losing a loved gadget sucks.
The paper route brought in enough for me to save up and replace the stolen watch with the now-collectable LCD Pac-Man game watch. It had a little joystick and everything, and made the most annoying sounds of any watch I'd ever owned. I never really did like pac-man, though, and ended up trading it to a buddy named Jason Goudie for some bike parts. If I'd only known to keep ahold of it, it's worth about $300 on the collectable markets nowadays. Figures.
A few watches came and went that I'll never remember, until the fateful day I got a DAK catalog while living in Michigan. DAK was kind of a prototype 'Sharper Image' catalog -- but more for the geek-gadget set than the golf-and-business-stuff set. It was run by some marketeer named Drew Alan Kaplan, and thus the name. This was when I was doing my tour-of-duty with the local phone phreak gangs, and was a proud member of the Phido-616's. I remember getting the catalog and opening it up to reveal the wonder inside -- a Casio databank watch with a DTMF generator. It could store 50 names and numbers, and when you held down the lower right hand button you had two seconds to lift the teeny piezo-speaker grille (located just below the watch-face) to the telephone mouthpiece before it would play the DTMF tones and dial the phone. To have this watch amongst phreaker friends was to be a Tech God. I saved paper-route money for a month, and did my first ever mail-order. I watched my mailbox for three solid weeks while the money order cleared at DAK. I loved that watch to death. Literally. It took a full year to give up the ghost. While a Casio, it was no G-shock, and was put to destruction just by the sheer level of use it got. I became skilled at using multiple memory slots to store some of the longer access numbers used in our little endeavors, firing them off in chained shots of little tones. The watch's passing coincided with a few close friends getting hassled during a little thing called 'sundevil', so like many things from that era of my life, I didn't go back for another.
A quick peek on the net shows that DAK is still around. If they still sold that watch I'd get another one, but they don't. Ahwell. :)
From that point on were the days of Casio Goodness. Calculator watches, G-shock 'wrapped around a hockey puck' watches, dual analog-digital ones, my first Altimeter watch, and so forth. Two timex ones slipped in there: one Ironman Triathalon (with that new nifty Indiglo backlight) was a parental gift, and my move to California found me purchasing a Timex/Microsoft 'data bank' that one programmed by pointing at a flickering monitor screen. Oh, and I also tried (but ended up returning) one of their early pager watches. Nothing was too terribly notable, and nothing fit too well. My wrist is big enough in adult life that I always have to put custom bands on things except for the monster G-shock modern ones. The most notable Casio of that period was one that had a thermometer in it. That just made the gadget-lusting part of me absolutely groove. It was wildly inaccurate thanks to body temperature, so it was of no use unless it was off the wrist for a half-hour to temp-stabilize. I'd never do that, though -- that'd mean not wearing it!
One thing that bears mentioning is my forgetfulness of small items. Unless it remains attached to my person or something I use regularly, I will lose it. The reason I didn't lose watches was because I never took them off. Seriously. I wore them sleeping. Showering. Swimming. During football practice (yes, I did that in Jr. high; played center). It got to where that band on my left wrist would have no freckles and lighter skin. If I ever took a watch off it was like this glaring white patch. This is why I never had a fancy watch, and why weak watches didn't survive. It had to be waterproof, tough, and resiliant or it'd die the way I wear watches. This got me a few scoffs from new California-area friends who felt wearing a timepiece was a statement of being 'under the thumb of The Man'; it was hip to be a programmer who had no sense of time and no schedule-keeping responsibility. They missed the point entirely. I didn't wear watches to keep the time. Gaah. You could get the time from anywhere. It was the other features that mattered.
One of the watches I ended up selling was a universal-remote-control watch. It was a 2nd generation model that would actually learn IR codes instead of just repeat ones stored in a preloaded database. While nifty, I'd long since surpassed that level of simple remote functionality and it was just something I couldn't get into. I passed it along to Frang for a good price, and he put it to much amusing use over the years.
Up until this point, all these watches (including the DTMF one) were notably inexpensive. My move to California in the pre-dotbomb time had brought me my first decent paychecks. This led to the purchase of my first two more-pricey watches and sunglasses. (Hmmm. I should do a silly entry on sunglasses too, now that I think about it.)( The first was Casio's new Triple Sensor. Altimeter, thermometer, compass, all in the same watch. It was astounding, for the late/mid-90's. They called it their "Pathfinder". It was huge, clunky, and blatant. You could see someone wearing this monstrosity across a crowded hall. I loved it. Heck, it kept dot-matrix graphs of altitudes over time, with a datalogger feature even! Just insane. It was also tough as nails. I wore and abused this watch for 2.5 years, having the face polished up by a jewler once to get rid of some scratches incurred during a nasty game of Martian Football (I caught the bezel on a protruding screw while getting into the pod at Virtual World). I ended up giving it to my dad, as I'd tired of having the same watch for so long but couldn't bear to see it unused. A year later I got it back from him as I'd missed it, and gave him a nifty Databank Twincept casio in trade -- a nifty new tech that uses multiple layers of liquid-crystal to make multiplane displays. The phone#'s and world-time map 'floated' above the analog hands and real watch face below. Neat -- but not tough enough for my tastes. It suited him well, though. I think he sitll has it.The 2nd of the priceywatches was the Casio GPS watch, the PAT2GP-1V. It simply doesn't get any geekier than this, folks. The watch re-defines huge. It has a rechargeable Li++ battery and a docking cradle to charge it in, as well as hook it into the computer. A full dot-matrix display. Waypoint memory. It even auto-updates the time/date from the GPS signal, so it was 'atomic accurate' before the radio-listening watches existed. It also worked like butt. It was the worst GPS I'd ever owned. It did actually function, mind you... it just functioned terribly. Much to my amusement, it helped me get a job -- or at least amused the interviewers at the GPS company I now work for. I sitll have this watch, though I broke the band in a way that's hard to repair. If anybody wants a GPS-watch for dirt cheap and can get creative with re-banding it (I broke the hole that holds the pin in place on the body), give me a holler.The failure of the GPS watch to light my gadgetty fire mixed with the newfound difficulty of wearing a watch under motorcycle gloves snapped me out of watch-having lust for the first time. A few days after getting the job I'm in now, I simply stopped wearing watches. After a year, I had freckles on my left wrist for the first time I can remember, and the skin-tone started to match the rest of my forearm. I still had a time-device in the form of my celphone, sure.. but the watch thing just felt so 'eh...' I even went to buy a nice G-shock cheapie, all blue and big-strapped with a thermometer... wore it for a whopping 2 weeks before putting it aside to never wear again. While Dusty and I were installing new toys on my motorcycle I was digging through the parts-box and found it. I gave it to him since it looked all lonely and he was watchless. He told me he didn't wear watches at work because he was a mechanic and would ruin them. I bet the tough little thing will surprise him. Since I know he reads this thing: Dusty, if you can manage to kill it in daily use, I'll buy you the new one of your choice. Take that as a challenge. :)
At this point I'd moved my celphone tech up to the lovely Nokia 9290. One of its features is the ability to handle digital photographs sent to it via infared. These pictures could then be sent over the net as email, SMS, or kept in the phone for use as a contact-card picture. When someone in your phonebook calls, their picture (if available) pops up on the phone display. A newly released watch, the Casio WQV10, could take uselessly tiny color pictures -- but they were the perfect size for contact card use. Acquiring one of these became a Moral Imperative. They weren't in the US yet, so I had to order it overseas. I found a properly motivated importer from Malaysia and got the watch for 1/3rd of what Sharper Image ended up charging for it upon it's domestic release a month later. Looking back at my own journal entries, this was in June. I used this watch for a good few weeks before I simply stopped wearing it. Part of it was due to the lingering issue of not being able to wear a watch under motorcycle gloves, so I'd forget to put it on once I took it off. Most of the reason was it was simply a sucky timepiece. Seriously. It had zero backlight and the color display was far worse than the much lamented problems with the Gameboy Advance. Reading the time even in good daylight was a challenge. This brings me now to the current watch. I just somehow felt it was time, once more, to get back into the whole timepiece thing. I missed my longest-worn watch, the Triple-Sensor. Newer versions were out there that supposedly worked even better. I finally found what I wanted in the PAG50 series. Triple-sensor, twincept, G-shock, 100M waterproof, big enough band, the works. There were two models that I couldn't decide between. The cheaper one was battery powered and had phase-of-the-moon and tides on the faceplate. The pricier one was solar powered, and didn't have those functions. I chose the former as I thought having moon-age was nifty -- but after having it a day or so, I realized they traded those features for the altimeter. Given the choice of the two, I'd rather have an altimeter than a moon-phase/tide indicator, really. So I took it back and 'supersized', which the shopkeeper was quite happy to do. I of course chose to do this on the day after thanksgiving, which means for the first time I got to see The First Shopping Day of Christmas up close and personal. Pure hell. Never again.This watch does everything the previous triple-sensor did, and more. To go down the laundry list, it has an altimeter, barometer, thermometer, compass, stopwatch, count-down timer, alarms, and a datalogger to keep lists of measurements previously taken. It's a twincept: the digital compass appears 1mm or so above the normal watch display, hovering there and turning realtime as you point the watch various directions. It's solar, so needs no batteries. 5 minutes of sunlight or 20 minutes of indoor incandescent light is all it needs to keep fully recharged. A full charge will last 8 months in the dark; longer if you let the watch enter 'sleep mode' when the solar cell senses it's dark out. It's smart about running out of power, too: it'll slowly shut down each power-using feature until only simple timekeeping is left, letting it serve its primary function as long as possible. The face is the size of a silver-dollar, making it both easily readable and right-sized on my big wrists. On a normal person it'd look awkwardly huge, I'm sure.
So... how does this all relate to the title? It's pretty simple really. It's the reason that I'm in love with this new watch, when the last one (the camera watch) went unloved. In the tale of two watches, the one that gets worn is the one that does what you need better than the other.
Of all the watches I've owned, wanted to own, or seen up close and personal... I've finally found something important in a timepiece. Through the menagerie of databanks, cameras, GPS recievers, triple-sensors, twincept multi-layer displays, uber-backlights, and DTMF generators I've worn more technology on my wrist than I want to think about. So what is this one feature that's proven so handy, so natural, so perfectly executed that it stands out amongst all the ones that came before? It's not any of the whiz-bang sensors or feepy bits. Instead, it's the simplest part of the entire watch:
When it's dark and you look at the watch, it lights up.
It's not just that it lights up. It does it perfectly. Elegantly. The motion required to lift the watch and tilt it to peek at the time, sensed by internal micro-accelerometers, automatically triggers the backlight and holds it on for a nicely timed 2 seconds. No other motions seem to set it off. If it's light out, the solar cell lets the watch know, so it won't trigger. This little bit of functionality is so smooth I didn't realize I was using the feature at first. Driving home at night, wondering how late it was, I tilt my wrist and peek out of habit. Crisp, gentle, green-lit numbers clearly state "1:30a". The light turns out just as I turn the wrist to put the hand back on the steering wheel. No button pushing, no squinting.
It Just Works.
The interface to the user couldn't be simpler. The concept is super-easy to describe to someone who might buy it: "When you look at it, it lights up." The internal technology to make this happen, and more importantly make this happen only when it's appropriate to do so is pretty intense. Now I know what I must seek in my future gadget-acquisitions. This level of simple and pure functionality sets a new bar.
Cool.
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no subject
Date: 2002-12-02 06:58 am (UTC)I need basic watch functions -- time, stopwatch, but it's handy to have something that always travels with you that also has important phone numbers in it. Generally my PalmPilot is the repository of all data, but there are times and places when the only tech I have on me is my watch.
Y'know, when we travel, we look like an electronics store on the move... DVD player, CDs, laptops, Palmpilots, patch cords, digital voice recorder, digital cameras... oy gevalt!
On the other hand, it's a fun way to live, y'know?
no subject
Date: 2002-12-02 08:41 am (UTC)I am SUCH a girlie, sometimes.
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Date: 2002-12-02 08:52 am (UTC)My mom got me a databank watch in 1990, which lasted 11 years (on 2 batteries!) before it finally, like yours, broke the pin-holder in the main base of the watch itself. I tried fixing it with epoxy, but it never truely held, so now I have a Citizen Navihawk, which is analog/digital, and has a slide rule :-)
Yep. So the Geek.
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Date: 2002-12-02 01:35 pm (UTC)I've got this obsessive thing about having analog hands on a watch. One of those right-brain/left-brain things that I won't get into right now...that's a rant for a different day. Instead, about watches that light up when you look at them...
One of my specialties/responsibilities/few-things-keeping-me-from-being-fired at work has to do with usability and interface design. I don't have any formal education in that field, it's just that...well, I was about to say I'm "the most well-read" on the subject of anybody at the company, but a more accurate assesment would be that I'm "the only one who even gives a shit." The sad part being that this situation is hardly unusual at software/technology/electronics companies.
The thing that gives me nightmares is when I get a feature request from one of the marketroids (usually forwarded verbatim from a customer), and always, without fail, these things start out with, "Add a button that does XYZ." Because that's the average person's understanding of graphical user interfaces: "it has buttons, therefore it's user friendly!" Add a feature == add a button. Nobody wraps their head around the paradigm enough to think how some new feature might be implemented without adding a button, or better yet, re-thinking things to add functionality while removing one or more widgets. Much of this might just be engineers, at least the ones I work with, being lazy...redesign is more work, so just throw more crap up on the screen and let the user sort it out, I still take home a paycheck either way.
Such frustration is compounded by the fact that the average user really doesn't know any better. A purchasing evaluation simply consists of "which has more features?" or "which has more horsepower?" without regard to how those things are implemented or directed. Long bulleted feature lists and colorful distracting blinky lights usually win...there's seldom any incentive for doing anything really clever, as few will notice and/or willingly pay for the associated engineering.
I don't work for Casio. I don't even design watches or anything like that. But I'm still really tickled to hear your enthusiasm not so much for a feature, but how that feature was implemented. Thank you for noticing someone's behind-the-scenes efforts. :)
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Date: 2002-12-02 04:32 pm (UTC)As talked about at Showgi (was fun to seeya!) here's that Tissot analog tech-watch I mentioned to you. It does most all the functions mine does, but makes creative use of an analog display to do so. The compass function is really cool to see. If only it weren't in the $500 range...
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Date: 2002-12-04 01:23 am (UTC)Sounds spiffy!
where do I send my resume? =)
I have a POS where the "buttons" for the various menus seem to dance depending on which menue your in... its so obviously a hack job. I've had to stop myself from thinking aobut it so that I don't screem. The best interface is one you don't notice, ever. But belive me people REALLY notice a bad interface. ... for example a "phone maze" especially one that doesn't have a "let me talk to someone real" option. As a matter of fact I use the bank I do, Sierra Pacific Bank if you happen to be in the area, because when I called a real live person actually answered the phone. Oh look at the time, I must be rambling....
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Date: 2002-12-02 01:36 pm (UTC)Then I got a PDA. It became my clock, once I got a program called 'Hell Clock' - it shows the time in a large, 'creepy' font, with little floating screaming faces, lightning, and evil subliminal messages.
Then my style shifted a little more, and the PDA became the BDA (because it started living in the Backpack instead of the Pockect) because I'm usually wearing jeans too low and tight to really have room in the pockets for it. Maybe I should start wearing a watch again. Or maybe I really don't care what time it is at this very moment any more.
The auto-light feature is, indeed, one of the coolest features I've heard of on a watch.
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Date: 2002-12-02 06:50 pm (UTC)Still, that last one is pretty darned cool. Mmmmmmm.
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Date: 2002-12-02 09:10 pm (UTC)Well, that and my calculator watch also stores phone numbers, but I can put those on a cellphone, thanks. I don't have a PDA or I could do calculations on that. Alas.
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Date: 2002-12-04 01:27 am (UTC)Maybe I'm just bitter 'cause the world seem to be designed by (and for) demented gnomes and it makes my back ache.
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Date: 2002-12-04 01:32 am (UTC)I'm wondering if we should custom make you a forarm brache and stitch half a dozen watches to it... or maybe a wristband that will hold a PDA? We could sew a watch to the back of your motorcylcle gloves, or onto your leather. Hell it sounds like we could stitch all your old watches onto your leather and make some sort of chronomaile.