HP Making a Dick Tracy Watch For the Military 66
eldavojohn writes "HP announced a device like Dick Tracy's watch, with a target user base being the US military. CNN describes it as 'a flexible display that shows maps and other strategic information to soldiers in remote combat fields. The watch's screen will be made of plastic and it will run on solar energy, making it less likely to malfunction or run out of power in a tense scenario.' HP says a prototype will be done within a year. This new device hinges on recent display technology that HP says it has been developing for 10 years. The flexible displays are a mere 50 microns thick."
Re:First Post (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, HP just bought Palm. Use your imagination.
WebOS based flexible low-power display smart "phones" that can either be wearable, or as a small carryable.
Translate the same tech over into the WebOS based slate, and you have a revolution in computing.
iPad nothin'. WebOS is the future. HP and Palm are going to take us there.
Re:Solar powered combat gear? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, if you do night ops, you're generally asleep during the day or doing LPOP. You just want to be careful about leaving a glinty little solar panel out if you're trying to be tactical.
Most military comms are like what you've heard in movies, everyone's basically on one network and takes turns. It's a little more complicated than that, and I won't go into specifics on a public forum, but for 99% of communications, all you need to do is press a button and talk.
My beef is that a watch is just a fucking stupid idea: assuming a rifle, you'd have to take your non-firing hand off your weapon to bring your wrist up to your mouth, then use your firing hand to press the damned talk button. Terrible, terrible idea.
If I were doing it, I'd make it a headset that fit in to the ACH and could be activated by biting, or by a switch you could mount on a standard picatinny rail. It should also use the latest greatest DSP so you don't have to actually vocalize to talk.
Re:Display (Score:3, Interesting)
I sure hope so! I've been waiting for forearm computing practically my whole life. It just seems to me the best way to combine a usably sized display with wear-ability. Bonus points if they can make a screen viewable from both sides (sandwiching 2 together would be an acceptable substitution) so you can flip it up to reveal a keyboard.
I've been wondering why nobody has made anything like this yet for some time. How many times have we seen good/bad guys in movies with the gps/vid phone/AI/etc. on their forearm and gone "Neat, I want one!"?
Re:I read the TFA (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, from TFA i understood that so far, they only have a flexible screen.
Plastic screens on a watch are a horrible idea. They scratch much more easily than glass ones.
Re:Great, an NMCI watch... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why should they believe NGEN will be any better?