Palm OS Wristwatch 242
countach writes "Amazon are taking orders for a new Palm OS Wrist Watch. It has an infra-red port, touch screen, back-light, stylus and 2MB of RAM. Price is $US 295.00." Because sometimes you don't look nerdy enough ;)
Precarious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it so ugly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you wear one of these? Its huge and the screen looks like it escaped from the 1980's.
There have been watches that allow syncing with PIMs for years (equally ugly). The MS SPOT watches look more interesting with their GRPS internet connectivity.
In this day and age they could have used OLED technology to make the face colour and themeable, so you could download nice different facias off the net when you felt like a change.
See? (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate the hybdrid device indusustry where one company thinks they can do "both" really well. It's prolly why a lot of pda phones fail. Pair up with Samsun or nokia and get a phone good design, work with MS or Palm to get a good software interface on there.
Who will buy this? (Score:3, Insightful)
battery life is 4 days!! (Score:4, Insightful)
info [amazon.com]
pass...
Resolution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't think Fossil did their homework... (Score:2, Insightful)
I didn't when I was teaching college algebra at my Uni. The only time calculators were allowed were when we got to the section on logs. I figured it was a nice comprimise from having to look values up from log tables.
I have no problem with caluculators per se, but they shouldn't be used when teaching fundamental mathematics. Learn it the hard way first, so you actually understand what's going on, then use a calculator for actual applied work.
Handedness... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now if only the watch was color and use a peephole display [berkeley.edu]...
You missed the point. Was: Who needs a watch? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't think Fossil did their homework... (Score:3, Insightful)
A wristwatch with a 4-day battery life? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe I'm a freak, but I have some fairly simple requirements for a wristwatch, which come down to wanting it to tell the time without needing me to go through unnecessary dicking around:
1. It needs to work for years on end, without my needing to wind it or change batteries at all.
2. It needs to be accurate to a few seconds a week or better, so I don't need to adjust it more often than travel and time zones dictate anyway.
3. It needs to be waterproof to any depth I'm likely to swim to without serious diving gear.
4. It needs to be shockproof enough to withstand (for example) my accidentally slamming it into doors.
5. It needs to be light enough that I don't feel like I have a brick tied to my wrist.
6. It needs to be easy to read in daylight and in the dark.
On top of that, it's a bonus if it isn't horribly ugly or repulsively ostentatious (hello, Rolex owners).
The requirements all seem fairly obvious to me, but you'd be surprised how hard it is to find a watch that fits the bill. I tried a Seiko Kinetic, but the mechanisms need servicing every few years.
So now I have a Casio G-Shock with a titanium case and solar panels on the face. At the time I bought it there was only one model of G-Shock with solar power and titanium casing, and it ended up being pretty expensive considering its borderline ugliness.
So anyway, a watch which has a battery life measured in days is about as much use to me as an Athlon heatsink made of chocolate. I wouldn't buy it if it was $5.
Re:I don't think Fossil did their homework... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. I say that the learning process is better if you learn how to do it first without a calculator.
I would say that it would be easier to learn, or at least grade math when calculators are used.
And I'd say (snarkily) that you've never taught math.
Think about it; if what you are really after is getting your students to understand the concepts, then why dissallow calculators that prevent them from getting incorrect answers from arithmatic errors ('oops, forgot to carry the 2' or some shit).
The point of learning something is to master it. In the grand scheme of things learning the fundamentals of math and futzing up an answer here or there due to an arithmetic error is exponentially better than *not* knowing fundaments and relying on your calculator for everything. Teaching math also means teaching how to think logically, how to understand the underlying principals so you can apply them to other situations than the ones presented in your homework.
For instance I also taught calculus. Whole chapters were devoted to graphing equations using maxima, minima and inflection points. Now, some kids wanted to use their graphing calculator to come up with the answers (and undoubtedly did when they did their homework), but they screwed themselves in the long run. Why? Because the point of graphing 40 equations wasn't to make pretty pictures, it was to drill the student in taking first and second derivatives, finding local maxima and minima, etc. Those who took the easy way out using their calculators were royally fucked when in the next section you had to apply those newly taught skills to solve minimization problems.
Has potential (Score:5, Insightful)
As for programs I think would be nice, there are a few. PalmReader might be doable, ditto Avantgo with the hardware navigation features from the 5.0 beta. Anything like a scaled down DateBook5 would make the platform. Think todos with alarms, event templates, and custom schedule views. Of course keeping in mind that almost all data entry will be on the desktop. Memo reader would be dead. Voice memos would be nice, pending appropriate hardware. Calcul-8! would probably be doable. Address Book could more or less work without modification (except for a bigger font), and would probably be one of the most useful things. But I think most of the killer apps are things we wouldn't even think of for the full sized palms
For a proper hardware design, I would have to insist on a few things. Number one, the digitizer must be easy to turn off. Really, it should be off most of the time. Number two, there must be sufficient hardware buttons (figure out a way to fit on a 5-way controller, and the thing will get way more useful). Number three, a super durable digitizer, or at least an indestructable, snap closed screen for when you are not entering data. Number four, a very sharp, high-contrast display. I kind of wish they could have shoehorned wi-fi or bluetooth onto this thing, in which case it would be a great little streaming news and email reading device. Another great thing would be an attachable fresnel lens to boost readability when you need it.