This year at CES, LG showed off a watch phone that made quite a splash.  A trip back in the JPT time machine shows us the Fossil Wrist PDA, which made a similar splash at Comdex 2002.

Just like the LG GD910 watch phone, the Fossil Wrist PDA was referred to as the “Dick Tracy phone”.  It was actually an entire Palm OS PDA in a watch.  The 160×160 pixel, one-inch diagonal LCD was quite small, but still a touchscreen.  In fact, there was even a miniature stylus that slid out from the clasp of the watchband.  It’s other specifications were not too different from a late 90’s Palm device: 66MHz Motorola DragonBall Super VZ processor and 8MB RAM.  The watch itself weighed about 3.8 ounces, which unfortunately fell in the awkward middle ground between light for a PDA and heavy for a watch.  Sadly, this was back before hip-hoppers and rappers popularized watches the size of dinner plates, so it was not particularly cool to sport an oversized watch that dragged your entire arm down.

Ultimately the Fossil Wrist PDA was doomed by the fact that it was pricey (it debuted initially at $249, with Fossil subsidiary Abacus selling a $199 version), not water resistant, and the fact that most people’s inner uber-geeks were too worried about public embarrassment to purchase it.

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