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No, SPOT! Wait! Bad SPOT! - Microsoft smart watch doesn't work ...

It seems like only a month since I4U was promising us Microsoft-designed SPOT (smart personal objects technology) phones for Xmas. At Comdex, the company said it needed to do more testing; next year, folks. Apparently, it still doesn't work.

The original prediction assumed that SPOT would, at least, work. It went like this:

"The Fossil Microsoft Wrist Net is set to sell for $199.00. Their is no buy button yet and no dates on when this watch will start shipping. Fossil already had to postpone their PDA Wrist Watch, they sure will not prematurely announce this one."

And this was followed, the next day, with the update: "Update 10/13/03: We just learned the release date for the Fossil MS SPOT Watch will be November 17th. So it will be available in time for Christmas!"

Over the weekend, enthusiasts from Extreme Tech rushed to Las Vegas, where the SPOT launch was expected during the Comdex trade show, and were disappointed. Not just because it wasn't there, but because it sounded ominously like it doesn't work yet.

The Comdex date was set in a speech made by Microsoft's founder, Bill Gates, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. At that time, Citizen, Fossil and Suunto (and others) said they were working in partnership on this project.

According to Extreme Tech, we could wait till April - if we care, that is. "Originally slated to launch at Comdex next week, the SPOT watch designed by Microsoft Corp. and its partners has been delayed until the first quarter of 2004 to accommodate further testing." The magazine added: " Executives at Citizen Watch Co., one of the companies slated to manufacture SPOT watches, also said Friday that they may pull out of the partnership and not ship a SPOT watch at all."

Reading between the lines, it's possible to get the impression that things are not going well. Asked why Citizen wasn't happy with the product, Stuart Zuckerman, senior VP of marketing, said he did not know the specific reasons why Citizen was considering pulling out of SPOT development.

Then he added the following, telling comment, said Extreme Tech: "He did say that the additional beta work would ensure that the receiver built inside the watch would receive the signal, as it's supposed to."

His quote: "If you can't receive a signal, you haven't bought yourself a product." No more data; but that doesn't sound promising.

The SPOT watch is a subscription service. It gives you $10 worth of information a month, downloaded off an FM radio service. That is, if it receives the signal.

Exactly why anybody would find this exciting, is still unclear.

The smart watch, as a PMG "sleek" already exists: Seiko Instruments has demonstrated a watch that can receive SMS text messages, ring tone and logo downloads, display caller identification - and can also check daily agendas from a connected smartphone mobile gateway. This concept was invented by IXI Mobile and shown at the GSM Congress in Cannes in February.

Microsoft's SPOT seems tame, expensive and unambitious by comparison: "Smart Personal Objects are everyday objects, such as clocks, pens, key-chains and billfolds, that are made smarter, more personalised and more useful through the use of special software," says Microsoft's publicity blurb.

"These everyday objects already exist in huge numbers, and, of course, all of them already have primary functions that people find valuable. So our goal is simply to improve on these core functions to make these new, smarter objects that are not just useful but indispensable," it continues.

"As an example, consider time-displays like watches and clocks. With the right software and hardware, these timepieces could be augmented to do a much better job. They could provide more accurate, perhaps atomic-clock-accurate, time displays. They could also be extended to display not just time, but timely information -- traffic information, schedule updates, news -- anything that is time-critical and useful to people."

The blurb then goes on to consider "Smart key-chains" which, "of course," will have to be improved along different lines: "they need to help people with the task of physical security, of locking and unlocking things."

It concludes: "There are lots of great device opportunities here, and the really neat thing is that we don't have to hard-sell customers on all sorts of whizzy new customer scenarios."

It would seem that here, at least, Microsoft is discovering that it wasn't quite right. It does have to hard sell, after all ... but first, it actually has to make something that "does receive the signal."