Chris Adams

Microsoft has a new product line:

LAS VEGAS - The first Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) gadgets, which could hit the market as early as this fall, epitomize the convergence that Microsoft sees happening in devices, connectivity and services. ... Wednesday night's keynote, Gates highlighted a forthcoming generation of SPOT watches that Microsoft is building with watch-makers Fossil, Suunto and Citizen. Microsoft will begin test marketing the first SPOT watches this month, Gates said, with commercial availability projected by Fall 2003. ... The watches will be able to receive information over DirectBand, a one-way FM radio network. Among the communications providers working with Microsoft to provide DirectBand are ClearChannel, Rogers, Gilat, Spacenet, Entercom and Greater Media.

I was one of the few people who owned this product the first time it came around in the form of the Seiko MessageWatch, with the same FM radio, paging, limited email, and news alert channels.

The MessageWatch was a great product but a commercial failure which lead to its demise in 1999: the main problem being that one-way network. Absent the sort of features two-way radio allows, there's very little going for that sort of product instead of a conventional pager and I doubt it's going to compete with all of the $20 pagers on $5/mo plans out there. Hardcore gadget freaks are more likely to skip the pager-watch entirely in favor of one of the new tiny, feature-heavy cell phones. Timex introduced a competing product a few years later which has also failed to set the world on fire.