Putting a New Face on Connectivity

At first glance, the Timex Internet Messenger Watch seems like overkill, especially in a society already armed with pagers, cell phones and souped-up personal digital assistants.

But after a few weeks of wear, I could see its appeal. The Internet watch I tried used the SkyTel messaging service and content from Yahoo, though it also works with content from MSN Mobile, Lycos Anywhere, Oracle Mobile, EBay, Strategy.com and four leading airlines.

Through Yahoo, I got periodic alerts sent to my watch telling me sports scores for specific teams, news about stocks and so forth. As part of the service, SkyTel also periodically sends miscellaneous news tidbits.

SkyTel issues each user a phone number that acts as a toll-free call-in pager number as well as the address for pages and e-mail sent through the Internet. The watch handles numeric and text messages delivered through a call-in system or through the SkyTel Web site.

You also can receive e-mail but only 100 characters’ worth, so filtering is a must.

The device builds on Timex’s popular and rugged Ironman Triathlon-style watch, with the standard stopwatch, timer and eight-lap memory, then adds in a wireless receiver for inbound pages, alerts and short e-mails.

It looks intimidating and complicated, with three side buttons and two more on the watch’s face, but the features are fairly easy to navigate after a quick look at the directions.

The watch face and the band are clearly not made for skinny wrists, but it’s the first pager-watch to be squeezed into a nearly standard-sized watch. The alerts and messaging features were fun and useful, but the e-mail was too truncated to be very helpful.

The watch costs $99, and the SkyTel service ranges from $4.99 a month for regional numeric paging to $99 a year for nationwide text messaging with unlimited voicemail and messaging.