Watch Phone / Phone Watch

Convergence is a wonderful thing

Convergence is a wonderful thing.  Instead of lugging around a calculator, watch, alarm clock, personal organiser, radio and MP3 player, most people now need just one thing: a smartphone.   If my phone could only make cups of tea and vacuum the sitting room I’d be sorely tempted to enter into a civil partnership with it, but where does this leave the makers of more traditional, less all powerful gadgets, like say, the humble wrist watch?

I was never one for fancy digital wrist gear because I find that there’s something inherently satisfying about the tick and click of an intricate network of tiny cogs, but even my analogue watches are now languishing in a drawer.  With my trusty phone by my side I can simultaneously check my emails, messages and calendar as well as the date and time, plus my watch used to get caught in my hair on a regular basis.

This year, however, a barrage of new products have been announced that aim to reinstate the watch as a must have piece of kit.

There have been several attempts to market a watch that links to a smartphone, most notably the Bluetooth enabled MBW-200 from Sony Ericsson, but so far these have only been adopted by a minority of customers.

Other gestures in a similar direction have been made by LG which debuted a “watchphone”, Samsung, and according to Crackberry, a product designed to work with the range of smartphones from Research In Motion is now on the cards for Blackberry owners too.

While Crackberry doesn’t give us any details of the timing of this gadget’s release and no tech specs either for that matter, several pictures have been posted on the blog of a solid-looking touchscreen .  The information is vague, but interesting nonetheless:

• “ It has been designed specifically for use with BlackBerry Smartphones from the ground up – developed by a new BlackBerry-dedicated accessory company
• It features an OLED screen that we hear is “big, bright and beautiful” and optimized for displaying text clearly, and thanks to OLED has solid battery life
• It’s designed to show you notifications and previews of messages arriving on your BlackBerry
• Judging by the filename of the photos as they were sent in to us, we’re thinking it’s going to be branded the inPulse smartwatch”.

Presumably the idea behind this gizmo is a time saving one; rather than digging frantically for your phone every time you want to check a text message you’ll have a quick way to check what’s going on in your life.

So now, in addition to talking to yourself like a crazy person while wearing your Bluetooth headset, you’ll also be able to sit staring at your watch as though you’ve forgotten how to tell the time.  Gadget heaven indeed!