Measuring 8 x 8 foot, three words are always lit up on the board, symbolizing the hour, minute and second. I've still got no idea how it works exactly, but it's like a big, arty version of a Tokyo Flash watch, isn't it. [Miss Moun via Moco Loco]

The watch, a form of which we've previously seen as a concept, hides red LEDs inside the pattern of the bracelet, which is kind of cool in theory but dorktacular in practice. Some highlights from the bizarre product description:

[It has] blood red numerals encased in stark samurai sword steel like the final battle between all the forces of good and evil in the multiverse

Yes, The Iron Samurai has been known to increase its wearers' strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma by as much as 20 points each! Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal are said to be Iron Samurai owners, as is David Bowie and Brian Eno. In reality, this watch is perfect for Presidential dinner crashers, Facebook celebs with over 1000 fans, Youtube directors with over 2,000,000 views, anyone who can play the entirety of Neil Zaza's I'm Alright on electric guitar, iPhone 3Gs owners, or anybody who is a somebody.

Yes, it's garish as all hell, but how many products can claim to be owned by both Steven Seagal and Brian Eno? [OhGizmo]

Fortunately, this novelty watch has not been completely lost to the ages. If you look hard enough, you can still get your hands on dirt cheap "modern" versions. [RetroThing via Gearfuse]

BTW, if you hate the gallery format as much as the Grinch hated Christmas, click here.

Sonic Bomb Alarm Clock: Step one to showing up on time is getting up on time, and there's simply no way to ignore the siren song Sonic Bomb Alarm Clock. The 113dB blast is almost as loud as a jet plane, and it shakes the entire bed, traumatically jolting even the utterly comatose to life. It's also simply a horrible way to wake up. $43. [Link]

Jolt Caffeinated Gum: Late people don't have time to make coffee or brush their teeth. Jolt's spearmint gum takes care of caffeine and fresh breath in seconds. Sorta. $3-$10. [Link]

Vibram FiveFingers Sprint Shoes: When all else fails—like public transit in New York City—sometimes you've just gotta sprint to where you're going. Vibram's FiveFingers shoes are the footies of choice for Google's Sergey Brin, and the center of a hippie natural running movement. Also, the hideousness should make you run even faster to wherever you're going. $80. [Link]

5 Second Stadium As passive-aggressive as it gets, Namco's 5 Second Stadium is gift that says, "Can't you learn how to tell time, assclown?" $14. [Link]

Motorola Droid: Why a Droid? Two reasons: Using Google Navigation on Android 2.0, nobody can claim they got lost, and on Google Latitude, everybody knows exactly where you're at. $150-$200. [Link]

Tokyoflash Watches: They look awesome, but no one call tell what the hell time it is with these things. $43-$250. [Link]

Casio G-Shock Watch: Casio's G-Shock watches withstand serious abuse and drowning, so excuses like "Oh, I broke my watch" won't exactly fly. And uh, neon green's a real hard color to ignore. $110. [Link]

Hermione's Time Turner: Our fantasy gift, we're talking about the real thing, not the $50 knock off on Amazon. Turn back time, and arrive everywhere right when you're supposed to. Oh, who am I kidding? I'd still be late. Priceless (or $50 on Amazon). [Link]

I was late turning this in, so surely, there's something I missed—toss your own ideas in the comments.

All Giz Wants is our annual round-up of favorite gift ideas, including amazing attainable objects and a few far-out fantasies. We'll be popping guides catered to different interests several times per day for the next week, so keep checking back.

The picture above implies that the watch had a gigantic keyboard attached to it, which is a little misleading. The UC-2100 keyboard is actually a pocket-sized dock that is used to control the device. There was also the option of purchasing the larger UC-2200 which included a spool-fed printer, 4K of RAM and a 26K of ROM via a plug-in Application ROM pack (contained Microsoft Basic—other ROM packs included games or an English-Japanese translation app). Essentially, this keyboard turned your watch into a PC with a really, really tiny 10x4 character display.

In 1984, purchasing the Wrist Information System would have set you back $300—or about $624 in today's dollars. Makes that smartphone seem like a bargain doesn't it? [Pocket Calculator Show]

Maybe not the best way to make friends. [Design Boom]

Think of it as an extender for your BlackBerry, or a wrist-mounted dashboard. It won't place calls or compose texts; it's really just there to give you a heads-up and preview whenever your BlackBerry mothership gets a call, receives a message, or has some other, being-a-BlackBerry-related news to share with you. Also, yes, it's a watch, for telling time. It may not do a whole lot, but the hardware sounds nice:

* 1.3" full colour organic light-emitting-diode (OLED) display
* Bluetooth® v2.0+EDR
* 150 mAh lithium-ion polymer battery
* Glass lens and full metal body
* 22mm interchangeable wrist band
* Vibrating motor
* Micro-USB port (for charging)
* Over-the-air firmware updates
* Dimensions: 51mm height x 38mm width x 12mm depth

Allerta, which totally sounds like a prescription mood drug, says the watch'll last for four days on a single charge, which is respectable considering that it doesn't look too hideously large. The InPulse will communicate with any BlackBerry running OS 4.3 or above by means of a free companion app. The watch, though, isn't quite as cheap: It'll ship for $150 in February, though it's available for preorder now.

One thing though: This is a nice render and all and the product doesn't smell like vapor, but why can't we see a picture of this thing?

UPDATE: About that! Eric from Allerta shot me an email:

Ah, it's your right to talk vapour because we don't have tech demos ready yet...I'm actually quite sorry about that. We're a new CE startup, so it's tough going from the get go. We actually have near-complete prototypes, but they're made out of brass right now (easier to CNC mill). We're currently in the month-long process of making molds for casting stainless steel. We didn't want to publish too many pictures of the brass watches, in case it confused people.

Which is fair enough. They've posted a few of the early prototype pictures here, in case you're curious. This is what they look like now—just keep in mind, these aren't meant to look nice, yet:
[InPulse via CrackBerry]

I don't know what's funnier, that Apple has the balls to erect a billboard so large it's illegal, or that Apple has such pull—financial and political—that they can get away with it. Since 2007 the 13,750-square-foot billboard has been up in a Boston-based storage facility, and the state has argued that it should come down. Protected in part by Boston hizzoner Thomas M. Menino and others, the ad remains, but after a temporary permit ran out, its owners had to pay a $110,000 "settlement." Sounds like a fine to me. Either way, the mofo is still standing. [AppleInsider]

On what looks like the Japanese equivalent of Regis and Kelly, a TV presenter showing off a Sony Vaio L touchscreen Win 7 PC can't quite get it to work. It's not fully frozen—it's the IR touch interface that seems to be the problem. Whatever the case, you can see this poor bastard visibly mourning his own rapidly decreasing family honor. And as for Reeg-san and JKelly, I don't know what they're saying, but I am pretty sure I've heard it all before. [MacDailyNews via CrunchGear]

Wal-Mart is sticking it to Best Buy with their own army of overpriced teenage-son replacements. You pay anywhere from $99 to $339 for, as Reuters puts it, "basic television installation on the low end to setting up a home theater, wireless router network or a home office computer network" on the high end. So let me get this straight, somebody paying $600 for a 40" LCD TV is going to pay $100 for it to be setup? Better yet, someone paying $30 for a wireless router will pay 10 times that for some dude to come install it? I mean, I know we're a service economy, but this is ridiculous. [Reuters]

My favorite Canadian co-CEO, RIM's Mike Lazaridis, did a kind of evasion/denial response to questions about the gloriously hideous Bluetooth BlackBerry smartwatch, a kind of wristborne Foleo, if you will. He kinda just giggled and said that the accessories they release are generally accessories that keep the BlackBerry handset at the center. Clearly this would be different—and CrackBerry maintains that it still may come out, designed and built for BlackBerrys by a firm unaffiliated with RIM. Sounds like a recipe for awesome to me. [TechDigest]

Very much like the LG GD910, except smaller, it has a touchscreen face. It is a quad-band GSM device so you can throw in your AT&T or T-Mobile SIM for voice. It has 4GB of on board storage and a microSD card slot for your media use.

It comes with a matching Bluetooth headset called the Communicator. We can't tell much about the quality of the device from the photoshopped images, but $199 isn't too bad for a phone that fits around your wrist. Question is, do you want it to? [Kempler & Strauss via Electronista]

The lens itself is located within the number 2, and its 1.3MP camera takes AVI video at a resolution of 352x288. Inside the watch lies 2GB of flash memory, which is enough for about 12 hours of video, and gets about 12 hours of battery life on a single charge (via USB or AC). It's pretty toned-down, looking just about like every other trendy oversized silver wristwatch out there, and costs $150. [Book of Joe]

Ninjawords was a victim of unfortunate timing, originally submitting their app in May, before iPhone 3.0's parental controls went into effect, and rather than wait for the controls to arrive at a then-unknown date, they tried to scrub the bad words to hit the store as soon as possible. Which wasn't enough to get in without a rating, and by the time everything was resolved, their scrubbed app was in the store with the 17+ rating suggested by the reviewer. Apple, Schiller says, simply wanted the app to carry a 17+ rating, with the entirety of its Wiktionary-powered language content—clean, dirty, downright disgusting—intact.

It's worth reading the whole letter from Schiller over at Daring Fireball, though the best part might simply be the fact Apple is listening, and they recognize that the App Store approval process has to improve. Of course, whether or not it actually does is another story. [Daring Fireball]

Gruber recounts the entire three-month odyssey, which began with developer Phil Crosby submitting his app in May. Ninjawords' dictionary was rejected for objectionable content, with a screenshots of the words "fuck" and "shit" in the search results. The thing is, Ninjawords is designed so you have to explicitly search for them—typing "shi" won't bring up shit, even though other dictionaries in the store will do just that. A third submission, with the bad words like "screw" and "snatch" filtered, had them rejected again—"cunt" slipped past their filter—with Apple telling the developer it would have to be rated 17+ to get approved, no matter what.

Adding insult to injury, when the developer decided to give in, censoring their dictionary and taking the 17+ rating, Apple wouldn't let them simply change the metadata to have a rating, they had to resubmit the entire app code, sending them to the back of the queue for approval. Apple didn't just gut a dictionary, they stomped on the developers throughout the entire contradictory approval process that had let through other dictionaries which even more "objectionable."

Gruber sums it up best: "Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day."

I think it can be said that the App Store is actually making us dumber now. [Daring Fireball]

According to the Borgeaud site, the watch automatically displays a daily 90-minute period called the Raju Kaal, which is believed to be a terrible time to make important decisions or start new projects.

Called "The Pachang," after one of the world's oldest almanacs, the watch will only revert back to its normal color after the Raju Kaal is over and "dark astral forces" have left the area.

Borgeaud is only producing 650 of the watches, with prices set above $2000 each. I predict they'll become a great way to weed out rich idiots. [Ananova]

All it takes is an Xacto knife, super glue, triangular head screwdriver, and a printout of the picture you want—and of course the Hello Kitty McDonalds watch. Just remove the toddler-size watchband and get to tinkering! In much less time than it takes for that Happy Meal to pass through your small intestine, you'll have your very own custom Domo watch! Or one with your girlfriend. Or Boba Fett. Or a different, even cuter picture of Hello Kitty. The choice is yours. [Instructables]

Designed by Kate Street, the watch has no traditional time markers and is only denoted by "Loves Me" every other increment. The stainless steel watch is part of a 100-piece, limited-edition collection. Perfect for Valentine's Day, it runs on a single jewel quartz and has a guarantee for up to 12 months. It's available for £115, or about $145. My best friend is probably hoping he won't have to hear my tormented ramblings about my crush anymore—hey, the crazy has to go somewhere! [Mr. Jones Watches via RedFerret]

81 years of it, if you are lucky, stacked by artist Michael Marcovici. [Art Marcovici via Book of Joe]