Dick Tracy, Get a Load of These Wristwatches

The ubiquitous wristwatch has come a long way since the first digital model hit store shelves for a whopping $2,100 in 1972.

Today, digital watches can snap postage-stamp-size pictures, download and play digital music files, receive pages and calculate your heart rate. And next year, Samsung promises a watch-phone that lets consumers make and receive phone calls and check e-mail.

But these cutting-edge watches might offer more of a gee-whiz factor than mass-market appeal.

Consider Casio’s Wrist Camera, which snaps black-and-white photos and displays them on its tiny screen. The watch, which hit store shelves this fall, holds as many as 100 images. It has a pencil-eraser-size lens and is remarkably small and fun to play with--once you spend a few hours learning how. It sells for about $200.

The problem is the wrist camera’s tiny pictures are mediocre at best. The camera requires a lot of bright light, so indoor pictures often appear murky. And it’s hard to calculate how close to place the camera to a subject. The watch screen holds about 24,000 pixels--small dots that make up the picture--compared with the 1 million pixels per screen available on low-end digital cameras.

The question for Casio, Timex, Seiko and other watch makers is whether consumers will forsake fully functional digital cameras, MP3 players and mobile phones for a less impressive version packed into a watch--all in the name of convenience, size and possibly price.

The newfangled timepieces are made possible by recent advances in micro circuitry, which allow watch makers to offer options unthinkable even to Dick Tracy’s creator, Chester Gould, who in 1946 gave his comic crime-stopper a two-way wrist radio--a watch plus a police radio.

Technically hip timepieces can be a hard sell because people like to make fashion statements with their watches, said Kevin Burden, a senior analyst who specializes in hand-held devices at Framingham, Mass.-based International Data Corp.

“Whenever you wear something, it becomes very personal,” he said. “Everyone in my office wears a watch, but I haven’t seen anyone with the same watch.”

For many, figuring out how to program a plain-vanilla digital watch already is tough enough; doing it with these new devices is even harder.

But there is no shortage of new digital wrist wear. Here’s a sampling of recent offerings:

Wrist Audio Player

Casio introduced the MP3 Wrist Audio Player this summer. The watch--which downloads digital music from the Internet--is hardly small enough to hide under a shirt cuff, but it is unobtrusive enough to wear with casual clothes on an airplane or to a ballgame.

At $250, the watch is more expensive than several stand-alone MP3 players. And it stores only about 33 minutes of CD-quality music, compared with a 2-hour storage capacity for similarly priced stand-alone MP3 devices.

The watch allows four hours of continuous playback when it’s fully charged and requires 70 seconds to download a four-minute track. Consumers can download music to the watch by snapping it into a unit plugged into their PC. One problem, though, is that the device runs only on computers with Windows 98 and a USB port.

Baby fingernail-size buttons on the watch let users fast-forward, rewind, play and pause.

But running with the Casio MP3 watch is only for joggers who don’t believe in swinging their arms. Tiny headphones plug into the watch’s side, forcing users to keep their watch arm immobile to avoid unplugging the sound.

Pager Watch

Timex/Motorola’s pager watch, the Beepwear Pro ($159), can store as many as 16 messages that it receives via SkyTel’s wireless network. This service runs about $9 a month. Using Data Link software and infrared technology, consumers can transfer phone listings and appointments from a PC to the watch by holding the timepiece in front of a PC monitor. The watch can hold as many as 150 phone numbers.

This watch isn’t in the way on a purse or a belt, as a conventional pager often is. But it is heftier than most watches, weighing about 1.3 ounces. It works like a conventional pager, beeping when it receives a page, although toggling the tiny buttons between pages takes some practice.

The pager watch can also receive digital data feeds such as news, sports scores, weather or stock information, which users can order from the paging service. These feeds march across the bottom of the watch face several minuscule words at a time.

Early next year, a slimmed-down, cheaper version that allows consumers to order data feeds over the Internet will be available, said Susie Watson, director of advertising for Timex. Fees for the SkyTel wireless network that services the watch will also fall, she said.

Technicians worked hard to make Timex’s forthcoming Internet Messenger Watch small enough to fit under a business person’s shirt cuff, Watson said.

The watch will retail for about $100. Users will be able to choose data feeds from various Web sites, which will bill the user’s pager service.

Heart Monitor and Watch

This summer, Timex introduced a watch that doubles as a heart rate monitor. The Ironman Fitness System sends digital heartbeat signals from a transmitter strapped around the user’s chest to the watch. Digital signals eliminate the interference that plagues analog heart monitors.

The watch retails for $105 to $140. Professional athletes cited in Timex’s media materials claim to be firm believers in this watch and its training value. But these athletes must use duct tape to keep the transmitter in place. The transmitter is strapped around a user’s chest with Velcro that doesn’t hold well during hard exercise.

Battery-Free Watch

Then there’s a line of Seiko watches powered by “kinetic auto relay technology.” Billed as the first human-powered quartz watch, the devices never need batteries. Every move the wearer makes creates electricity that powers the watch.

If the watch is stationary for more than 72 hours, it goes into a power save mode. A user can pick up the watch any time in the next four years, shake it a few times, and watch the hands spin to the correct time. Prices start at $400.

Of course, this sounds like a high-tech version of the $20 self-winding watches that have been around since eight-track tapes.

Seiko says its version is better because a wearer’s movement gets stored in a crystal capacitator inside the device that remembers the time for years. The company adds that quartz watches are more accurate than spring-wound versions.

PC Watch

Today, watches with computer-like functionality are old news. This spring, Casio introduced its second version of PC Unite. The watch retails for about $100 to $130 and can link with Microsoft Outlook, allowing the wearer to transfer e-mail addresses, phone numbers, geographic addresses and appointments from a PC to the watch. It stores as many as 8,200 characters of text.

And how close are we to Dick Tracy’s wrist TV?

Seiko-Epson and several other companies have built prototype wrist TVs. But video watches had to weigh more than 1 pound to offer a decent-size color screen and enough battery power for an hour or two of viewing time.

Last year, researchers at Texas-based Microtune shrank a TV receiver and tuner to microchip size, but they say even with these advances a wrist TV is still a few years off.

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Times staff writer Jennifer Oldham covers real estate.