Casio Data Bank DBA-800 Auto-Dialing Digital Watch
Making phone calls on a smartwatch is trivial now, but in the ‘80s it required users to look at both a watch’s screen and the keypad on a touchtone phone to manually enter someone’s digits. That was obviously too much of an ask for some, so Casio created the Data Bank DBA-800, which replaced the numeric keypad with a speaker that, when placed next to a phone’s mouthpiece, would automatically generate the tones needed to dial a number. But the ease of use that feature introduced was negated by the fact that names and phone numbers had to be entered using just two buttons, requiring users to step through the entire alphabet to slowly spell out someone’s name. One step forward, two steps back.
