Fossil Wrist PDA
www.fossil.com/pda

I’ll freely admit that I’m a gadget hound. I love high-tech toys and I’m a sucker for anything electronic. So, I was really excited when I found out that I’d have an opportunity to play with the Fossil Wrist PDA and do a review of it. Now, after five days of playing with it and wearing it constantly, I have to write a kind of schizophrenic review.

First off, the watch has a lot of neat features. It sports a large 102 x 64 pixels (approx 1.25 x .75 inch) wide display that has an excellent backlight. In addition to displaying the time in your choice of display styles, it can display your schedule, address list, to-do list, or memos, which can be downloaded from a Palm or Pocket PC (I was using the Palm version) through an infrared port on the watch. The display is clear enough to show even the weekly or monthly schedule view quite legibly.

The Wrist PDA holds 190k of data, which may not sound like much, but all my important addresses, my busy schedule, a bunch of memos, and a modest to-do list barely scratched the total capacity of the watch. You access the data through a very nicely thought-out system of two buttons on either side of a joystick-like button, which serves to scroll through lists and make selections. You can also beam business cards to or receive them from other Wrist PDA’s, Palm’s, or Pocket PC’s equipped with the Peacemaker conduit.

You set up your Wrist PDA by beaming the PRC to your Palm – no computer needed for this operation. Then you set up the Wrist PDA preferences on you Palm, select which categories of data you want beamed to the watch, and then sync by infrared. The beaming takes a while, but it’s simple enough to just hold your Palm next to the Wrist PDA for the process, and it works flawlessly. The Wrist PDA comes with a stand to use for beaming, but it’s hardly necessary. It uses a pair of 3v CF2032 lithium coin batteries and comes with a spare set. Since it uses flash memory, data won’t be lost even if the batteries go dead.

So, this is sounding pretty slick, isn’t it? Well, this is where the schizophrenic part starts.

There are few minor bugs in the Wrist PDA. One is that, while there is an alarm, it is so very quiet I could only hear it with the watch right next to my ear. This might be a flaw limited to the watch I have, but it rendered reminders pretty much useless, since I would only notice I had an appointment the next time I looked at the watch – usually long after the appointment. Also, the buttons, while well thought-out, don’t have any tactile feedback, which makes it difficult to know if you are pushing them quite right. Beaming business cards is cool, but you can’t view them until after syncing with your Palm.

Most of all, the Wrist PDA is big. It is nicely styled, and curved to fit your wrist comfortably – or, I should say, my wrist. For my wife, who has somewhat petite wrists, it was completely unwearable. But it is just, plain big. We’re not talking Breitling-chronograph-big or even 70s-LED-watch-big here, we’re talking Star-Trek-communicator-big. At more that half an inch thick, more than and inch-and-a-half wide, and nearly two inches long it’s hard to miss. I promise I’m not making this up: virtually everyone noticed it and said it looked like something the police would put on you when you were under house arrest. Still, it does have a sort of Spy Kids techno-coolness to its looks.

But the biggest problem is that after using it a few days I couldn’t figure out what function it was serving. It could display the data from my Palm, but I couldn’t enter new data, take notes at meetings, or make new to-do items. Given how obvious and large it is, it certainly isn’t less noticeable or more convenient than simply carrying a Palm in a belt pouch, and yet it only does a fraction of what the Palm can do. If it could grab that data off of your PC it might serve as a good alternative to a Palm, but since you have to have a Palm or a Pocket PC to use the Wrist PDA, I’m not sure what I need it for.

If you’re an even bigger gadget junkie than I am and you don’t mind a huge watch, maybe the Wrist PDA would work for you. For the rest of us, it’s probably wiser to take the $145 they’re asking for the Wrist PDA and invest in some cool software and a nice belt pouch for the Palm.

-- Tucker Hatfield
Senior Palm Reviewer