Seiko Message Watch was doing this 5 years ago. I could enter personalized stocks, weather, sports data into a web page and receive updates via subcarrier FM. All that has changed here is MS bought up all the unused frequencies after the dot.coms ditched the project. There's nothing "secret" about it. All that has changed is the watches are faster with better displays. Geez. Way to innovate.

If the DirectBand "feed" contains all data and the watch is responsible for filtering data, I can imagine hardware hacks to "unlock" the full potential of your watch. And Linux and Windows desktop users will probably soon be tapping into the free air waves, too.

Definitely, especially since the watches only receive data, and don't send any. No one could tell if you were trying to tap into the data stream. Fun!

Each watch has a hardware ID that is tied to the pager number. So I guess you could clone an ID, but you'd end up hopping around until you found a profile that had the info you wanted. Each user builds a profile of what they want sent to the watch. [ClientID]+[1stDataSet]+[etc.] When updates fit into the slots they get sent out.

Would you *have* to have an ID number to pull out data?

Also - who is going to pay 10$/mo for this? Isn't XM/Sirius radio cost not much more than this for loads of tunes?

While ago I have developed a similar idea of using FM radio
to deliver IP to handheld devices ...

http://open4all.info/drazen/Wireless_Networks_Handheld_Devices

Dunno should I be glad because idea made it to the big
arena, or sad because I did not make any money...

Does nobody else besides me think that this is a terrible failure of imagination?

I mean, all this cool stuff, so that we can have friggin' SPORTS scores?

Given that there is no feedback channel to ensure data gets to the watch, you can't really commit anything important to this channel.

Sports scores are about right. If the notification was really important, I'd use text messaging so that I don't miss any messages. (They might be delayed, but not missed.)

On the other hand, if they offer an email notification link, then you can apply all the creativity you want because you can just package up info in email subject headers.

Edited by author 01-30-2003 09:26 PM
The SPOT watch uses a technology that's 20 years old and a concept -- a watch -- that's almost as old. Promoting news, sports, weather, etc. is going to fail. It has been tried again and again and again. These are commodities and no one will pay for them.

However, Microsoft does have a chance if it looks more at fun applications than the generic pap it has discussed.

I've been analyzing wireless since 1978. If you're interested in some analysis of the SPOT watch concept, check out some entries in my Weblog:

http://reiter.weblogger.com/2003/01/09
http://reiter.weblogger.com/2003/01/10
http://reiter.weblogger.com/2003/01/10

Alan Reiter
reiter@wirelessinternet.com

besides all the other failure to excite...setting itself to the timezone. Because, gee, it's so easy to slip from timezone to another without even knowing... maybe if you're one of those "VCR blinks 12 12 12" folk, but still.

I'm not the first to say this, but the really sad part about this is that this watch was the biggest thing at last fall's Consumer Electronics Show. Tech is dead.

kisrael, there are areas where it _is_ easy to slip from timezone to timezone. I think it's Indiana where the decision about whether to observe daylight savings time is made on a county-by-county basis. I'm dubious of the broadcast signal's ability to actually give the watch the correct timezone in those areas.

Sometimes when I travel, especially on short trips, I like to keep my watch set to my home timezone, anyway.