From CES – The LG “Wrist Phone”
Now, you can feel like Dick Tracy! (I am dating myself, I know!) Anyway, weird, but will it catch on?
LG feeds wrist watch talk wish
“Is it that at any other CES, we’d all be chirping about the advent of a working, non-hideous wrist phone? Or are we all just too jaded to believe? Either way, LG may have lost a perfectly reasonable wrist-mounted mobile phone in the stampede. LG is a mighty big company, in the vicinity of which we are told Life’s Good. What that means, practically speaking at a madhouse such as CES, is that there among the washers and dryers and huge flat-panel screens and touchscreen handsets and consumer diversions of every kind in their suburban-home-sized ‘booth,’ LG is apt to tuck in a few little flights of whimsy. A weary reporter appreciates the change of pace, LG appreciates the attention, and so it’s all, as half the name suggests, Good. he problem is the waiting for the flights of whimsy to take off — especially in a year where attention coalesced around another phone, the one that’s near to not only launch but, maybe, to saving its parent company’s bacon. LG showed a prototype of the Touch Watch Phone last year. This year, it’s operable…but LG reps told us that it won’t be for sale until the second half of the year, and even then only in Europe to start. And just like that, press attention turned elsewhere. Whatever the technical achievements tucked into the 68g / 13.9mm chassis of the timepiece, its greatest achievement may be that it didn’t look utterly ridiculous. Though most tech folk above the age of 20 can remember multiple attempts at this sort of thing (your reporter’s personally still waiting for one of those bone-conduction fingerphones), LG chose to pare down the features and maintain sensible styling. The resulting gadget looks clean and not terribly mobile-phone-like; we saw several of the 13 offered interfaces that looked like perfectly acceptable face design. (Fashion tip: If you find you must own one of these things, stay with the analog dial.)”