Hello, my name is Donald, and I’m a geek

Hello, Donald.

Thank you.  Yes, I am a geek, I love geeky stuff.  And one thing that every geek needs is a geek watch.  I’ve tried two of them, the Casio PIM watch and the Matsucom onHand PC watch.  They’ve each got their strengths and weaknesses, and even a non-geek might find them useful.

Here they are, the Casio on the left and the onHand on the right.  The Casio isn’t as unusual, the big display on the onHand just screams geek. But the Casio has lots of buttons, which makes it geeky in its own way.

The onHand makes good use of the display, it’s a small monochrome LCD screen with all the flexibility it implies.  The Casio, on the other hand, has two lines of text (9 characters each) and six numeric characters.  This allows the onHand to have a very nice visual interface.

A gripe I've had with the onHand is that the screen is normally off.  You have to hit a button to make the time appear.  The Casio's screen is always on, showing the time if none of the PIM functions are in use.

Seeing the buttons on the Casio, you might be asking, where are the buttons on the onHand?  It has four buttons:  Filer/Time, Menu, EL, and Enter.  Filer/Time shows the current time over whatever screen is showing, Menu brings up a menu to make commands/choices from, EL turns on the backlight, and Enter selects whatever is selected.  Do you see that little black nub below the screen in the onHand's picture?  It's a small joystick, left/right and up/down.  It works, it's very easy to pick up.

The Casio buttons are fairly straightforward--press schedule or contact to view your appointments or address book, press mode repeatedly for other functions.  The arrows scroll up and down, Back is to undo, Enter is to select whatever is selected.  There are two buttons on the side, for backlight and for menu choices or settings.  The buttons are a bit mushy for my taste.

You can enter text on either watch, and the method is similar--you enter a "text entry" mode, then use the up arrow and down arrow on the Casio and the up and down positions on the onHand's joystick to pick the letter.  It works, but it's tedious.  Both of these are really designed to show you your data.  Better to enter them on a computer and download the data.  (More on this later.)

 So what can they do?  The Casio watch is a PIM, period.  Contacts (address book), Schedule (appointments), To Do List.  They also have something called "Browser Mode", which is essentially viewing lists or memos.  Unfortunately, the Casio's limited screen display makes large amounts of data painful to scroll through.

The onHand PC may not live up to the claim of being a PC, but it's definitely a PDA.  In addition to Addresses, Schedule, and To Do List, their Memo format is much more readable than the Casio's.  But we're barely started.  It comes with an Expenses program, 4 games (Puzzle, Reverse, RForce, Snowboard), Calculator, Timer, and you can even download graphics into it.  OK, it's black and white, but it's still cool.  It can shrink the picture down to fit on the screen (usually giving a muddle mass) or you can pan across the picture.  Maps, anyone?

Matsucom has a developers kit so that people can create their own programs.  Need something more?  Write it!

Both computer allow you to download data into the watches, and also install programs and patches for the onHand.  The onHand has a cradle that plugs into your computer's serial port, the watch has connectors that the cradle grasps.  The software is very easy to use and straightforward.  It can automatically sync with your existing data, from Palm Desktop, Outlook, and others.

The Casio uses Infrared to connect to your computer, it includes an Infrared adaptor that hooks up to your computer's serial port.  I found the program a bit clunky.  If you want to synchronize your watch, it has to download and upload, and you have to put the watch back into connection mode between the two steps.  Minor pain.

But very cool is that it includes a Palm Pilot application that you can download to your pilot and it can sync directly to the watch, no computer involved.  Same with Windows CE devices.

It may seem to you that the onHand PC offers a lot more than the Casio does.  You might suspect that you pay for it.  You'd be right.  The Casio is sold online for $49, the onHand PC is sold online for $179.

I keep switching between the two.  I prefer the sleek styling of the Casio, but really miss the real active matrix screen and the onHand's joystick--the joystick is just very good design work.  If I was planning for a trade show, I think I'd take the onHand and load it up with maps and notes.  If I was working at either of the companies, I'd try to steal the best ideas from the other guys.

GadgetDon

Casio PC UNITE BZX-201SCR and BZX-207SCR PIM watch, $49.
Matsucom onHand PC watch, $179.