PC Watch Coming

If you're a child of the '80s, you know all about the strange changes that came to watches: calculator watches of all sorts and game watches with Donkey Kong, Frogger, and Pac Man, to name two examples. Although calculator watches have had little influence on pop culture at large, given the proliferation of beeper watches and databank watches now appearing on the wrists of the technically savvy with a few dollars to spare, the arrival of a watch that would make waves was bound to happen sooner or later.

That day has arrived.

Seiko will soon launch wristwatch-type personal digital assistants (PDAs) in Japan called the Wearable PC Ruputer MP110 and the Wearable PC Ruputer Pro MP120. The devices (soon to be gracing the pages of the Sharper Image catalog no doubt) will use a mini pointing device on top and a backlit 102x64 black and white LCD to display personal information, maps, text data, and time to its user.

Although the only game included with the Ruputer is checkers, we expect that someone will develop something for the watches sooner or later - hey the watches are Japanese so they have to have some games on them don't they?

The watches will go on sale June 11 and will perform many of the same functions that some popular PDAs do today - albeit with a much higher level of shock resistance. The MP 110 will cost 38,000 yen (US$295) with 512KB of flash memory; the MP 120 will cost 48,000 yen ($372) with 2MB of flash memory.

The waterproof Ruputers are a little bulkier than normal watches. Communications for the Ruputer is done via a small cable that attaches to the side of the watch. The other end of the cable is plugged into your Windows 95 PC. Data is uploaded from your PC into the watch so you'll have access to phone numbers, calculator, file manager, appointments, and other miscellanies (including filter software to convert JPEGs, GIFs, and BMP graphics to a proprietary Ruputer ).

Four buttons on the side and a pointing device on top serve as a means to select items. And the pointer can aid in inputting information, although the main focus of the Ruputer is for read-only data. The pointer from the picture looks like it could serve well as a small joystick with only a little getting used to. One option that could be promising to gamers is the infrared link (IR) that allows two Ruputers to communicate with each other - or with a Sharp Zaurus PDA.

With all the power that the watch seems to have, the Seiko Ruputer might be a good gaming machine with a lot of extras. Only time will tell if the devices are successful.

Be forewarned, though, that there hasn't been an announcement to release these watches in the US. One interesting fact is that the Ruputers share the name MP 110 and MP 120 with some of the earlier versions of Apple's now defunct PDA, Newton.