Samsung Shows Wristwatch Phone

Wristwatch devices were at the fore at last week's CeBIT trade show in Hanover, Germany, where Samsung Electronics unveiled a nonworking prototype of a new watchphone and Motorola showed prototypes of several wearable computing devices.

The Samsung phone, scheduled to be available later this year, was on display at the company's crowded telecommunications booth at the show, alongside new cellular handsets, PDA phones, and smartphones.

Designed to run on GSM 900-MHz or 1,800-MHz networks, the Samsung watchphone also connects to GPRS packet data networks and Bluetooth personal area networks, according to Samsung.

Smaller Scale

There is also a built-in WAP browser, although the watch's 96-pixel by 64-pixel screen, which has a diagonal width of roughly 1.2 inches, could be a little small for any serious mobile Web browsing.

The screen is an OLED display and can display 256 colors and, like many of Samsung's other cellular telephones, has a 40-tone polyphonic ringer. It also has a speaker-phone function.

The watch weighs less than 2.8 ounces and measures 1.5 inches by 2.5 inches by .7 inches. Its battery can provide 80 hours of standby time and 90 minutes of talk time.

No other technical specifications were available from Samsung at the show but the company said the product would hit the European market in the fourth quarter of this year. Details for other markets were not announced.

Samsung unveiled its first prototype in 1999 and showed a second model in 2001 although the version on show at CeBIT is the most advanced yet.

Product Plans

Motorola, which unveiled a new design for such a device last week, took the wraps off a concept model in 2000. The designs unveiled this week include not just watches but also glasses, ear buds, digital cameras, and pens with phone functions and other functions, and were co-developed with Frog Design.

Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone produced a working wristwatch phone in 1998 and supplied prototype units to officials working at the Winter Olympics in Nagano although a commercial product never followed.

Watchphones are just one example of work being done by several electronics companies to build devices into packages the size of wristwatches.

Earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft, showed off a wristwatch built by Fossil based on his company's Smart Personal Object Technology initiative. That watch is not a phone but can display information broadcast on a slow speed data channel by FM radio stations.

Fossil is also planning to produce a wristwatch PDA in the middle of this year that runs the Palm operating system.