I ordered a SPOT watch before Christmas, and it arrived today. I've got it activated and customized. It's fun to play with. Time (with a lot of different watch faces), multiple time zones, weather, news, stocks. Receives IM messages from MSN Messenger. I can upload calendar items from Outlook to the watch automatically too through the MSN direct network. They have a "glance" setting where it rotates through information from all the channels.
Sports channel coming soon. That'll be fun in baseball season.
It's a little bulky, but not really noticeably so.
You know what I like best about it? It's fun.
Our industry isn't very good at making fun products (outside of the gaming industry). I think Microsoft is pretty good at making software that's very functional, useful and productive, but it isn't fun. I think that's one of Apple's long-held secrets to success. People like using Macs (and iPods) because Apple makes fun interfaces. (that, and as Don Norman explains, people buy Macs because they believe that they're better than everyone else :-)
The SPOT watch has some very whimsical watch faces. And they have a neat feature: they introduce a new face every month which downloads to your watch and you can decide if you want it or not.
They're really just getting started with SPOT devices (I know a bit about this because SPOT started in Microsoft Research) but I wish that they would have done a pocket watch in the first round of products. That would have been cool.
10:27:02 PM  ; ;
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