Fossil @ CES - The Wrist PDA lives!
You know how a gadget gets written off as vaporware and you think that it's never going to come out? Well until today, Fossil's Wrist PDA was one of those gadgets. First announced way back in late 2002 and originally slated to drop in 2003, Fossil ended up pushing back the release of the Palm-powered wristwatch and then pulling it from its line up entirely citing some production problems (we heard that the tiny little touchscreen the watch used had a defect rate and there were some other miniaturization problems). Then in November the rumors started to surface that Fossil was bringing the Wrist PDA back from the Valhalla of vaporware, with a big announcement planned for the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show. Not that we didn't take Fossil at their word or anything when they said that the Wrist PDA was being retooled rather than remaindered, but we were a little bit surprised when we actually spotted a pair of them at the CES Unveiled press event last night. Remarkably, the basic specs are mainly unchanged—it has a 160x160 pixel grayscale LCD touchscreen, 66MHz processor, 8MB of memory, and it runs on Palm OS 4.1 (they claim it can actually run most Palm apps)—but the one semi-surprise is that there are going to be two versions. One is the Fossil branded FX2008, which'll be priced at $249.99, and the Abacus branded AU5005 which'll be availably exclusively through Tiger Direct and retail for $199.99. And yes, both look like Fossil's recent SPOT watches.
