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Reviewed: Not-So-Smart Watches

The Duo check out the latest in wrist technology, and they're not impressed.

The Duo make a fashion pronouncement (specifically, "ick!") and the tech industry attempts to put lipstick on an elderly pig as "smart watches" hit the big desk.

Steve notes that Microsoft's smart-watch line was previously known as Spot, until snarky reviewers such as he made one too many "woof, what a dog!" cracks. Angela states that though watches such as the Suunto N3 can gather news, weather, sports scores, stock quotes, and (gack) horoscopes from the ether, "smart" is a serious misnomer here.

The watches also do instant messaging--or, at least, are able to receive messages from MSN messenger users. (Answering those messages? What did we just say about the "smart" thing?)

Stylish they're not--the watches are huge and clunky, and the non-Microsoft, the Palm-running Fossil PDA Watch Wrist PDA model relies on a tiny, nerdalicious, and wildly unwieldy stylus stored in its buckle to operate. A few do attempt to spice up their looks by offering a variety of animated watch faces, which Steve says are generally great at everything but letting you tell time in a hurry.

Angela lets the watch faces slide but can't abide the so-called news services, which displayed a headline and the first sentence of each story, a "solution" that led to unintentionally hilarious results during testing. Steve mocked the Microsoft model for allowing receipt of calendar data from Outlook but not contact info or e-mail, and both Duo members slammed the pathetic battery life on these gadgets. The "smarties" need to commune with the charger at least once every five days, and the Palm/Fossil model needs juice even more often.

Save/Delete

Steve: DELETE

Angela: DELETE

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