Those tried-and-true hands definitely get the job done, but glancing over to find out what time of the day it is should be an adventure. Singaporean Hans Tan has crafted quite the atypical timepiece with his Idea of a Clock (revision 2), which utilizes a LED bulletin board to spell out the time in text rather than using symbols, numbers or long sticks. Best of all, those interested in making the act of watching time go by somewhat enjoyable can order one from the artist himself, but considering the limited edition nature of the piece, we wouldn't waste too much time waffling over pulling the trigger.

[Via technabob]

We tend not to make a lot of predictions around here, but we've totally got odds on TIME magazine's pick for 2007 Person of the Year (and not just because we're owned by the same parent-company). Since TIME already named the iPhone both Invention of the Year and, more recently, Gadget of the Year (along with devoting a fawning cover story to it), it seems to us that the obvious path of least resistance for jaded journalists eager to start their holiday vacations is to screw over Gore and go for another easy-bake geek pleaser. Plus, what better symbol to convey the restrictions on political freedoms still so prevalent in the 21st century than the current poster child for walled gardens? Granted, it hasn't been since 1982 that a piece of electronic equipment took home this prestigious honor (renamed Machine of the Year in deference to the PC), but after lowering its standards so drastically last year by choosing you of all people, well, TIME has shown that almost anything has a shot.

Apple's "love it," "hate it" or "hack it to pieces" iPhone is Time's "Invention Of the Year," following up last year's YouTube win. Nothing more to say about this thing that hasn't been said a million times, but don't worry, Time is careful to retread it all just in case you've been in a coma since January.

You know what they say about Japanese trains being so reliable you can set a clock to it? Ironically enough, Yumekobo's Yamanote alarm clock does just that, and while we're sure the vivid green color scheme isn't for everyone, its features (feature?) are what counts. Apparently, the clock communicates via radio with the train station, and the train symbols surrounding the hands correspond to where a given train is located at a certain point in time. Additionally, it sports built-in chimes and melodies to match those played in the actual station, and of course, can wake you up at a set time so you don't miss your morning ride to work. Not a bad device to keep around for ¥7,980 ($66), and in case you're still a bit stumped on how this thing actually operates, check out a web-based demonstration here.

[Via Gearfuse]

Here's a likely candidate for most unnecessary, albeit entirely geeky device of the day. TimeTools' T1000 Precision Time Server links up to your Windows, Linux, or Unix workstation in order to obtain "highly accurate time" from GPS satellites. Interfacing via a RS-232 serial port or USB (depending on model), the T1000 connects with GPS systems via the included patch antenna to retrieve the current time within 100 nanoseconds. Furthermore, the 30-gram box is said to be fully weatherproof for survival out in the wild, and while we're not quite sure what the price on this oh-so-precise piece of equipment will be, it's probably only worth it for the bragging rights.

[Via NaviGadget]

Apparently, even swipeless credit cards are too much of an inconvenience to carry around in Turkey, or else Garanti Bank and MasterCard are just doing a fine job of whispering PayPass into those ears that are now tuned in. Gimmick or not, the two firms have partnered up to dole out a few limited edition timepieces that not only sport embedded PayPass modules to skip the painful John Hancock procedure altogether on basic, low-dollar purchases, but also feature a flashy and surprisingly tawdry motif. The bright orange watch rocks a few soccer balls, er, footballs on the face, and also includes a handy date feature to keep you on track. No word on exactly how one would go about procuring one of these contactless payment watches, but if your Garanti account is pushing six or seven figures, we'd say you've got some leverage.

[Via TechDigest]

We've seen some pretty frightening things come over to the consumer electronics realm in the past, but Chris Dimino's The Shining cuckoo clock is probably the most apt to leave a very unfriendly image burned in your mind. Designed by the same guru who brought us the keyboard waffle iron, this cult classic tells time like your average clock, but as each hour strikes, a demented Jack bursts through the door, proclaims "Here's Johnny!," and grins while Shelly Duvall lets out a piercing scream. Of course, Mr. Dimino would have quite a bit of paperwork to sign with the movie studio if this thing were to ever go on sale, but we're sure there would be quite a line ready to drop unfathomable amounts to put this shocking souvenir in their own Room 237.

So even though the world didn't come to an end due to the earlier daylight-savings time changeover this year, one 15-year resident of Hempfield, PA certainly got burned by the supposed energy-conserving maneuver, as his school's inability or failure to change all of their clocks earned him 12 days in juvenile detention on charges of making a bomb threat. The story goes like this: For some reason sophomore Cody Webb decided to call the Hempfield Area High School delay hotline in the early morning hours of March 11 -- very close to the time we "sprang ahead" -- and claims to have hung up immediately after listening to the obvious "no delay" message. Well unfortunately for him, someone else called Hempfield that morning with a bomb threat, and because the phone system erroneously time-stamped that call as coming just minutes after Cody's, school and local law enforcement geniuses decided that they must have been made by the same person (despite one call showing up on caller ID while the other was blocked). Long story short, it took Cody's parents and their lawyer 12 days to get the honors student out of juvie; and while you would expect a public apology from everyone involved in this blunder after the facts came out, school officials are trying to pass the blame along to the state, which seems more concerned with covering its proverbial legal ass than making things right for the now-home-schooled Cody. Lessons learned? 1. Our schools need to devote more resources to teaching the nuances of telling time, and 2. Teenagers are clearly better off partying and causing mischief on a Saturday night than sitting at home on the phone.

[Via Slashdot, photo courtesy of S.C. Spangler/Tribune-Review]

True clock aficionados fully understand that their timepieces do more than tell them just how many grueling hours are left in the work day, and YUnoBI's Dancing On The Water design invites time tellers to gaze at its mirror-image rather than just glancing and looking away. The lacquered enclosure comes in black, red, and gray finishes, and shoots the current time up against a reflective back that purportedly gives off a "floating illusion." Furthermore, the red digits are displayed care of built-in LEDs, and while you may be eager to snap this presumed dust-magnet up as a crafty conversation piece, the ¥68,250 ($573) asking price just might stop you in your tracks.

[Via TechDigest]

It's no secret that FM transmitters are dodgy at times, but if you were wading through the endless supply of MP3 watches on the market in an effort to find one a notch below hideous, having that feature built-in certainly wouldn't hurt. The king of all things USB has upped the collective ante once more, as its FMP3 Watch not only musters a bearable design scheme, but it also offers up a nice laundry list of specifications to boot. Aside from telling you the time and day of the week, it also boasts 512MB, 1GB, or 2GB of internal memory for MP3 / WMA playback, headphone out, an integrated voice recorder, USB connectivity, volume controls, eight-hours of battery life (three if beaming over FM), and the obligatory FM transmitter to stream your tunes to one of several FM options. If you're anxious to get your wrist into one of these suckas, all three flavors are available right now, and can be had for ¥12,800 ($108), ¥16,800 ($142), and ¥19,800 ($167) from least capacious to most.

[Via EverythingUSB]

There's not a whole lot of things we'd consider more worthy of technolust than a Pong clock, but a Pong clock that fits on your wrist is most certainly one of them. Although the build process looks far from easy, this beautiful piece of retro nirvana sports an all black motif, 96 x 64 resolution OLED display, 33-hours of battery life, and the ability to mesmerize even the boldest of the bold. By utilizing a good bit of handyman skills, a great bit of circuitry knowledge, and an awful lot of patience, John has created a surefire "hit at his office," and while no one has paid him a compliment just yet out on the streets, we know some hearts have been filled with envy nonetheless. Although the amount of detail required to craft such a device far exceeds what we can describe here, be sure to hit the read link for an elaborate build log complimented with snapshots, and click on through for the live action video.

[Via MAKE]

AT&T has a long history of hanging around in the world of technology, and apparently a group of prophets were running the show circa 1993, but the wise men and women in charge were a bit slow on engaging their own predictions. A marvelous artifact of "what technology would become" was recently unearthed, showing AT&T's hypotheses about what devices and marvels we'd see in the years to come. The video file (click on for the YouTube demonstration), originally found on a CD-ROM called "Newsweek Interactive," speaks of e-readers, in-car GPS units, tablet PCs, WiFi, memory chips, interactive ATMs, videoconferencing, biometrics, digital medical cards, downloadable flicks, on-demand content, distance education, and even internet browsers -- all years before these things hit the mainstream (or were even invented). Ironically, none of these creations were crafted directly by AT&T, as other firms apparently pulled the trigger on these ideas before the telecom giant could do it itself. While it's easy to take text messaging, Bluetooth syncs, and quad-core processors for granted now, we've got to wonder how wild things will be in just another decade further from 1985.

While there's definitely no shortage of watches that serve a greater purpose than merely telling time, Jeonjun Cho, a sophomore at Kyungki University in Korea, has developed a timepiece that does nothing more than display the current time to the blind. His braille clock collection has both aesthetes and utilitiarians covered, as the sleek silver finish makes for a snazzy piece of 2001-esque jewelry, and the solar-powered braille ticker allows the blind to check the time without consulting their RFID-enabled robot tagalong. The necklace and watch each share the same readout, which is composed of simple "dots, lines, and planes," all basic factors of creating braille numbers. So if you've got a visually impaired pal who hasn't picked up a talking cellphone to keep him / her on schedule, these fashionable timepieces could be just the thing to keep things on track.

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

At this week's World Wide Developers' Conference, Apple nary missed an opportunity to jest at how certain features in Vista bear similarity to those in Mac OS 10.4, recalling banners from the 2004 geek gathering enjoining the developers of Windows to "start their photocopiers." However, the copy machines at Microsoft aren't the only ones free of cobwebs. For example, a decade before Spotlight shone in Tiger, utilities such as On Locaiton provided classic Mac OS lightning-fast index-based searches. And Konfabulator, now owned by Yahoo, inspired Dashboard.

Spaces, slated for Leopard, promises to be merely the best-implemented in a long line of virtual desktops long known to Unix users and even made available as a PowerToy from those Windows wannabes. And what of Time Machine, the fourth-dimensional feature that was the WWDC showstopper? Among its predecessors are System Restore, a drably named subset of Time Machine's functionality available since Windows ME; Rewind, a classic Mac OS utility once promised for Mac OS X; and GoBack, a PC utility that was purchased by Symantec. When I first saw GoBack, the earliest of these, which debuted at a DEMO conference, I thought it was one of the most ingenious pieces of software I'd ever seen -- even without Time Machine's extraterrestrial eye candy.

One wouldn't think that being a second off every, oh, 70 million years or so, would be such a huge deal, right? Apparently that benchmark just isn't timely enough for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, whose Time and Frequency Division has fabricated an experimental atomic clock based on a single mercury atom in favor of the fountain of cesium atoms used now. They've discovered the prototype is even more accurate than the current standard, and would only lose one second every 400 million years. Obviously nobody reading this will even be around in 400 million years (um, right?), but there are reasons to improve aside from holding the time steady: precise time-keeping aids in accurate syncing of GPS and navigation systems, telecommunications, and deep-space networks. We admit, this whole thing leaves us a bit flabbergasted, but the sense of absurdly painstaking scientific security we'll get from knowing that while civilizations rise and empires fall, no one will live to see this atomic clock miss a beat -- well, that couldn't have come a moment too soon.