It was a matter of time before the wristwatch had its biggest redesign moment since the croc-like invasion of the big-faced bling disaster that took hold and made hipster fashion designers rich. Smart watches are on their way, but there’s one feature we’d include in ours, if we designed these things, which we don’t.

In 1977 Hewlett-Packard manufactured the HP-01, it had 28 little buttons and was one of the first calculator watches to hit the market for the Bill Gates types.

The complicated device was a hybrid mixture of algebraic sums and watch, so Hewlett-Packard decided to call it a “wrist instrument” instead. I can almost hear Will Ferrell sarcastically mocking that.

Some 30-odd years along the line and the first concepts of smart wristwatches have begun to do the rounds. Basically, like a smart phone, the first prototypes of Bluetooth enabled watches are getting some interest with longer term visions including full wireless capabilities similar to a smart phone.

Phil McKinney, the chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard’s personal systems group, displayed the MetaWatch last month at an event in Shanghai. It’s a prototype developed by Fossil that he described as the first generation of “the connected watch.”

“You have 4 new messages and 6 Tweets…”

Design is so far minimalistic and one of the main aims is to recapture the youth market, that doesn’t really wear watches anymore. The prototypes essentially have the means to receive things like text message and email alerts, with an emphasis on the touch screen and scroll properties of something like the iPhone.

What would we add? The actual functionality of a phone of course! It could simply connect to your cars built in stereo system, which might have the internet, and voila – Skype in your car on your wrist. We could call it the “phwatch” or something.

But then we found PhoneWatch and realised that was why we don’t design these things.

[Source: nytimes]