We hate to pile on with the problems/complaints about the new SPOT watches, but Peter Rysavy has some “tips” on how to kill your Abacus SPOT watch:
Take off a sweater. Touch a thermostat. Have a co-worker touch your watch. All of those actions can at least temporarily disable your Abacus watch. Multiple users have already reported the problem over at the SPOTstop forums (here and here). And I have had it happen to mine twice already. The first time I hadn’t even realized that had happened. All of a sudden the watch beeped, I looked down, and saw a screen showing me the time and my timezone . After that, it took some time to download all my channel information again. I thought the watch had some sort of glitch communicating with the network and forgot about it. Then tonight I came in from being outside (in the Northeast we had a balmy day and it was over 30 degrees “warm”) and took off my sweater. We have cold and dry air, and there is a fair bit of static electricity. I felt the tiny sparks. I looked at the watch and the screen was dead. I tried the three-finger salute for the Abacus (push all three buttons on the right side – I’m not sure if it’s the same for all the other watches) to reboot it, but nothing much seemed to happen. The watch eventually turned back on a few minutes later. The custom watch face I downloaded remained on the watch, but I lost all my downloaded content. The time had reset to 12 midnight on January 1st. It took about 5 minutes to sync the time (and get the time and timezone screen), and another 5 to download the channels.
