The Apple Watch has been out for over two months now, and other modern smartwatches well before that. It’s no longer the stuff of sci-fi to consider using your watch to play music, control your TV, or track your fitness. But these are all things that you’ve been able to do for a surprisingly long time – well, if you maybe lived in Japan in the ^aEUR~90s and didn’t mind carrying around a bunch of Casio watches, that is.
I already highlighted several of these Casio classics in my Moto 360 review, but The Verge does a nice job of listing them with beautiful photos.
A lot of those are pretty awesome, and I would’ve definitely rocked some of them back in the day… Hell, maybe even now.
However, none of them are as cool as this one:
http://zeldawiki.org/The_Legend_of_Zelda_Game_Watch
Here in the States we didn’t have access to most of those, but I remember one of my friends had a Casio with the IR remote function and he used it to mess with the TVs at bars and restaurants.
Myself, I had several of the DataBank series throughout the ’90s and early 2000s, and I had a couple of the Timex DataLink watches as well.
That’s why I’m so irked by people saying the smartwatch didn’t exist until the 2010s, or even worse, that Apple “invented” it in 2014. Even if your definition of “smartwatch” is a Bluetooth-connected second screen/notifier for your phone, Sony had them as far back as 2010 with the LiveView.
As far as I’m concerned though, I was rocking smartwatches when Clinton was president.
Ha! I had a Zelda watch for a while as a kid… fun time waster. I don’t remember actually wearing it that much though.
I think the last watch I wore was a Casio Databank (mostly for the calculator functions – although I’m pretty sure it had some scheduling/calendaring features I enjoyed as well) – but that was probably 25 years ago at this point. I haven’t worn a watch in a very very long time…
20 years in the soil, still functional :
http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2015/06/24/montre-casio-fonctionne-20-…
One more vote for the F91-W:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwOMUhS8gV0
Seeing those button-festooned models kinda makes me feel we have lost something with the move to touchscreens.
Holy crap, those watches are astounding.
How was that done? Was all that functionality implemented with some sort of “Casio OS” on a processor? Or was it just done with (extremely) intricate circuit logic? Or something else?
Operating system is probably too generous for what it was. For embedded systems like that, its most likely just what you might consider to be firmware. No layers of software between bare metal and user functionality.
I had a calculator watch. Not only that, but it stored 50 contacts too.
And the model I upgraded to later on could do trig functions. Woo!
It definitely defined my clique in high school.
I love Casio watches – they’re often the best value out there for price vs. functionality in the digital watch realm. However, their resin straps in recent years are utterly shocking – they break very easily, usually at some weak point where the clasp finger (for want of a better word) goes through one of the resin holes.
What’s worse is that the cheaper Casio resin straps are unreplaceable – you can’t just detach them and buy a cheap new resin strap to fit it. So I have now have a set of Wave Ceptor identical watches with broken straps and the battery is still going on them years later!
It’s why I switched “upmarket” to a Protrek (PRW 2500) that was going at less than half RRP – a resin strap from Casio that can actually be replaced!
I’m wearing a $10 unbranded G Shock look alike . I just buy one and replace it when the battery goes flat or the strap breaks.
If this is what makes the battery of a modern smartwatch, then thanks but no thanks.
https://www.apple.com/watch/battery.html
I am waiting for a smartphone watch that will last for a week, but then again, fail. It should at least last for a year.
I have a Martian Notifier that so far has gone nearly a month without a charge (and it has a separate coin cell battery for the analog part that lasts several years). I had a Pebble Steel before that, which would usually go seven to ten days on a charge.
On the flipside, I have a Sony Smartwatch (my first of the modern crop of smartphone-connected smart watches) which barely makes it through a day, has a terrible display, and is butt-ugly. Granted, it was one of the first of the new breed, but I find it laughable that the battery life of smart watches in 2015 is barely any better (and in the case of the Moto 360, far worse) than that of a watch from 2011.