Gizmodo: cellphone watch

LG Touchscreen Watch Phone Will Support 3G, Speech Recognition, Little Girl Fingers

John Herrman — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 04:43:59 EST

Details of a new LG watch phone, likely to be announced at CES, have trickled out through the company's Korean site. And surprise! It looks hard to use. But not—and this is important—unusable.

The first thing to notice is the specs: unlike last time around, they're actually pretty solid. The GD910, as it's called, will support 3G, HSDPA, Bluetooth, text-to-speech and speech-to-text, and finally, videoconferencing via a front-mounted camera.

These capabilities, far from being the useless feature bloat that we see on gimmicky hardware like this, seem to be geared toward making this wrist piece bearable. Don't want to fiddle with little watch buttons to make a call? Use the touchscreen. Don't want to type on a tiny on-screen keypad? Talk to your phone. Don't want to walk around with a watch to your face like some kind of portly, neckbearded, wolfshirted FBI agent? Hook up a Bluetooth headset and you'll just look like a nerdy soccer dad. And videoconferencing, mercifully built in, is probably the most important feature to have on a quasi-spy gadget like this.

That said, there are still a few problems that will be unavoidable in this form-factor, the largest of which LG has implicitly acknowledged with their product photos: unless you are a young child with young child fingers, don't plan on having an easy go of it. [UnwiredView]

EP2502 Cellphone Watch: Surprisingly Stylish, and Waterproof

Kit Eaton — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:30:00 EDT

There's something about the idea of cramming a cellphone into a wristwatch that keeps the designs rolling out, but is this the first one with a touch of style? Possibly, with that metal case and strap, and looking not too horrifically fat to wear. The EP2502 even has a 1.3-inch OLED touchscreen, a 2-megapixel camera, tri-band and Bluetooth support and claims to be shockproof. It's also supposedly the World's first waterproof cellphone, though we don't know to what waterproofing standard.

Here's the full run-down:

•OLED screen: 1.3 inch OLED 260k; resolution:128 x 160px touching panel.
•Water proof, Shock-proof
•Languages: English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, turkish, portuguese, french, chinese
•Standby english, thailand, dutch, german, russian,vietnamese,chinese,rabbinic,etc.
•Ring tone: 64 polyphonic; support format:mp3/midi/wav
•Incoming ring tone, incoming photo, incoming movie
•Music format: mp3
•Movie format: mp4,full screen
•Camera: 2.0m pixels
•T-flash support: free 512 tf card. extend to 2gb
•Bluetooth function: supported
•Picture format: jpg/gif

Its battery will give you about three hours of talk time and around 160 hours of standby, which seems fairly decent actually. The best bit about this piece of Dick Tracy tech, though, is the price: it's just $299, and is available from May 10th. [Surprising Gift via Howardforums]

Van Der Led WM2 Cellphone Watch Actually Looks Good Enough to Strap On

Jason Chen — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:50:00 EDT

We've seen our share of cellphone watches (here, here, here, and here), but this Van Der Led WM2 cellphone watch is probably the first and only one we'd actually wear ourselves. There's a 1.3-megapixel camera, a 1.3-inch screen, a dialpad on the strap, 1GB storage for MP3/MP4 files, and stereo Bluetooth support. The only downside is its $471 price tag, but anyone who's in the market for a cellphone watch probably has that kind of spare cash to throw around and obviously doesn't care about how other people perceive them. [VanDerLed via Slippery Brick]

Tag Heuer's Cellphone is a Watch Phone?

Jason Chen — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:39:30 EST

The announcement earlier this week that Tag Heuer was designing a luxury cellphone didn't inspire shock as much as a raised eyebrow, but Biggs the watch fetishist over at Crunchgear dug through his old archives and found this rendering. Dated January 18, Dialaphone.uk found these renders of a possible Tag Heuer cellphone watch that's both classy and able to call people. Whether this is the actual Tag Heuer phone is uncertain and unlikely, but we'd actually really love a cellphone watch that doesn't look like something we'd wear in the third grade. [Dialaphone via Luxury Launches via Crunchgear]

Cect Cellphone Watch From China Has Bluetooth, MP3, MP4 and FM Radio

Jason Chen — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 15:50:30 EDT

The M500 GSM Watch from Australia isn't your only cellphone watch option now with the Cect Mobile watch from China. It's got a semi-decently large LCD, six hardware buttons, GSM support, Bluetooth, MP3, MP4, FM radio and a headset jack. No pricing yet, but it does come in all sorts of colors. [Phone Daily via Slashphone]