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Watch For More (7/13/99)
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So this email watch thing that everyone's buzzing about-- you know, the one that Swatch is working on, which will apparently be available in an Apple-styled Mac-compatible version-- we thought we had it all figured out. The original MacSR report has since been updated and clarified, and here's what we make of it: The watch itself has a Radio Frequency ID chip in it that can communicate with the special included mousepad. When the mousepad senses the presence of one of these special watches, it's able to read the user's email info (server, login, password, etc.) wirelessly and send that data to the computer, which can then connect and download the user's mail. The watch is just a passkey that lets you easily check your email on any computer with the special mousepad, without requiring you to enter all that tedious server and account info yourself. Neat, but not that neat. After all, it's not like the watch itself downloads the email and lets you take away on your wrist.
Or can it? Now a Wired article has gone and confused the issue again. According to Wired, Swatch officials stated that "the mousepad will download the email before beaming it to the watch." Suddenly this email watch sounds a whole lot more interesting, right? Being able to download your email and read it on the bus on the way to work in the morning might be worth the $125 you'll have to shell out for the watch/mousepad combo.
So is Wired correct, or was there just a misunderstanding? Perhaps something got lost in the translation. We have a feeling the email watch won't do anything except beam your account info to properly-equipped computers, but it's nice to dream. And anyway, if it's a nice iMac-styled watch and mousepad, the set might be worth $125 right there. (The iMac ad right on Swatch's home page gives us hope.)
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SceneLink (1657)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 7/13/99 episode: July 13, 1999: It's still sort of unclear just what exactly this Apple/Swatch email watch does, but we want one anyway. Meanwhile, Dartmouth's computer science department accepts a slew of NT workstations donated by Microsoft, and the Eurythmics get set to rock the web via the magic of QuickTime 4...
Other scenes from that episode: 1658: Alas, Poor Dartmouth (7/13/99) We've all heard plenty of stories about higher education institutions who were formerly huge Mac supporters starting to lean towards the Windows side of the world in recent years. Apple maintains that its educational market share is either holding steady or increasing, but whether or not that's technically true, there's something very damaging from a morale standpoint when a Mac campus suddenly goes Windows... 1659: Sweet Streams Are Made.. (7/13/99) QuickTime 4 has been out for a while, now, and Apple recently announced that it's been downloaded more than eight million times-- "underscoring the growing popularity of QuickTime as a streaming media format."...
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