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Coming sooon: The Bluetooth Watch

Thursday, December 31, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Like Checkbox News, the Social Camera and the Twitter Camera, this product is just around the corner. Someday soon we'll all have watches that do Bluetooth. 

Here's the pitch. 

Earlier this decade Microsoft started an effort they called the Smart Watch. It pretty much failed. Some people wore watches with keypads, presumably so they could do calculations or write memos. You'd have to have fingers about 1/100th the size of human fingers for that to work. I'm sure there were lots of other early attempts to digitize watches, but in the end, watches are good for telling time and not much more.  

The reason -- to be ergonomic a watch has to be small. But to have a decent user interface a watch has to be big. Too big.  

That's why the functionality that could have conceivably gone on our wrists is now in our pockets -- on smart phones, Blackberry, iPhone, Droid.  

In-our-pocket is the wrong place for quick text messages. They should be on our wrist! 

Enter Bluetooth. 

I don't know the economics but I imagine a digital watch could be made to look beautiful and also to have a mode where it couples with our phone and acts as a receiver for text messages. That way every time someone DMs you on Twitter it could show up on your wrist, with a little vibration only you feel.  

I considered calling this the Twitter Watch, but enough with Twitter. They get too much free publicity.  

Discuss! 

PS: I know there are Bluetooth Watches, but they got it wrong. The display should be the whole watch face, not a sliver of tiny text beneath an analog watch face. And it's nice they can show you the caller ID, but I don't get nearly as many phone calls as text messages. A watch could display 140 characters, if you temporarily displace the time display (until you click the face to dismiss). The ones that try to be an MP3 player or cell phone are just as ridiculous and doomed to fail as the smart watches of the 90s.