Windows Phone Thoughts: Got The Time? The SPOT Watch Review

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Monday, March 1, 2004

Got The Time? The SPOT Watch Review

Posted by Jason Dunn in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 10:00 AM


Feb 6th, 9:29 AM – It was recharge time again for the watch, although this time I didn’t wait for it to tell me it was about to die. There’s a small battery icon that comes up on the screen when the battery starts to get a little low. I think it's reasonable that most people will put the cradle near their bed, and drop it on every night. It's a good scenario overall - except for travelling that is.

I’ve been thinking more about how the watch is used as message receiving conduit, and there are some flaws in the current implementation. The first one I touched on above – people on my Messenger list don’t know I have a SPOT watch, or what that means, or how to send me a message. There’s no exposure to the fact that they can send a message to my watch, unless I explicitly tell people that they can. I changed my Messenger name to Jason Dunn (right click and send a message to my SPOT watch), but then I ended up getting 10 SMS messages to my phone because people were selecting “Mobile Device” rather than watch – and some of them didn’t even have the option to send a message to the watch. Pure chaos!

The other problem is that there’s no email gateway – if I could get short email messages sent to my watch, it would be much more useful to me. I could create [email]spot@domain.com[/email] and have people email that when they wanted to send a message to my watch. I do something similar with my mobile phone – I have a specific email address that forwards to my mobile SMS address (thank you Fido for having an email to SMS gateway!). Not everyone in the world uses Messenger, but if you’re on a computer, odds are you have access to email. And there are quite a few companies out there that don’t allow IM clients, so that cuts down the number of people that can reach me.

Feb 10th, 10:38 AM – As you can see, my frequency of updates have slowed, which means that this blog review is now over – the momentum is gone. Looking back on my use of the SPOT watch over the past two weeks, what do I think of it? I have mixed feelings about it to be honest. On one hand, I like the potential that I see there – many people wear watches, and there's great potential there for a "dumb" device to evolve and become more useful. The challenge I see here for Microsoft and the SPOT OEMs like Fossil and Suunuto is that another "dumb" device that people carry everywhere is also evolving: the mobile phone. You might not think that a watch and a phone are competitors, but stop and think about it: many people I know stopped wearing a watch because they started carrying a mobile phone everywhere, and their phone tells then the time.

Looking at the target market, the type of people who are likely to buy a SPOT watch, I can't help but think that these are the same people who own mobile phones and PDAs. The question then becomes, what can a SPOT watch offer these tech-savvy people that their other devices don't? How that question is answered over the next year or two will determine how well this product does. One clear advantage that the SPOT watches have is that they're something you wear, and as such, quick access is a given. For some people, being able to glance down and immediately get the time, stock info, or the weather, is an important factor to them. For myself, it's not terribly important. A SPOT watch user is someone who needs to have information, and that information would trigger an action. For instance, when I showed the SPOT watch to my uncle, an avid day-trader, he asked if it could get real-time stock quotes. There isn't that option yet, so as the services evolve for this device it may become popular in specific markets.

So the question is, will I wear the SPOT watch regularly? Probably not. For me, wearing a watch is a bit of a hassle, so the benefits have to outweigh the costs. The benefits of a SPOT watch today are things that I already get from my Smartphone and my Pocket PC. If the SPOT watch was more capable, held more data, or allowed for some form of two-way communication, it would be a more useful device for me.

Feb 22nd, 5:04 PM – One inherent truth in life is that you won't fully appreciate something until it's gone. So, as an experiment, I didn't wear the SPOT watch for a couple of weeks. Did I miss it? No. For my needs, the SPOT watch just isn't a good fit. I know of people who adore theirs, however, so it's a matter of the watch filling a need. Maybe if it would have turned me into this guy, I would have liked it even more. ;-)

Addendum: As I was wrapping up this review, with my SPOT watch sitting on the charging stand unused for many days, it beeped at me to remind me about an appointment that I had entered into Outlook perhaps an hour earlier. It was an important conference call that was set up at the last minute, and I had Outlook closed, so the reminder wouldn't have popped up. Worse, neither my Smartphone nor my Pocket PC had synched in the past hour, so the SPOT watch was the only device that was able to remind me about this call.

It clarified something for me that's been rolling around in the back of my mind since first receiving the SPOT watch: the concept of SPOT is killer, but the integration of it in a watch, for me, isn't useful. What I'd love to see is a SPOT chip set integrated into a Pocket PC or a Smartphone. On a Smartphone, imagine having a bigger, greyscale screen that functioned as a SPOT display, feeding you weather, news, and appointments. That display would always be active, and always be receiving the data over the FM radio frequencies. From what I understand, the SPOT platform is based on a small subset of .NET CF, which should mean integrating it with the Windows Mobile OS shouldn't be too difficult. The concept of SPOT is very powerful, and I hope to see this technology move out into different form factors, where it may very well have a bright future.

Special thanks to SpotStop.com for being a useful resource for me while writing this review.

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