When I saw the ad for this watch in a catalog, I remember the tag line said "No way!" I read the copy, understood the picture and said out loud, "No way!" I was outside at a coffee shop in Marina Del Rey, sitting by myself.
Yesterday during a boring part of a development meeting I successfully slinked away into my office to read some email. But there on my chair was a package and a note from Larry that said, "Please review this for Go. Afterwards you can keep it." No way!
Here's the gist of my review: I tore it open, put it on, installed the software, and downloaded my PC's time and date smoothly into it in under 10 minutes with no manuals. Less than 30 minutes later I had downloaded 50 numbers into it from my organizer software (via spreadsheet) and knew everything about the watch.
This morning I took a shower with it. I tried to keep the soap off, but you know how things can happen in the shower. Anyway, it's fine. No problem with soap.
There's a mini animated demo/tutorial that plays every time you run the Windows software. You simply cannot screw it up. The demo can be turned off for thoroughly confident users, which you will be if you do transfers around once a week.
One complaint is, I want more memory in the watch. I'm sure if I had to use the 2 watch buttons to key in a few dozen KB of data, chr by chr, I'd feel that I'd never fill it. But now that it's so easy to dump and redump the slightest correction straight from my existing database, I wish I could fit all 300 entries, instead of the most used 10%.
It feels sort of funny having "Microsoft" written on my wrist, especially since it's there on the same face with this one tiny but potentially creepy HAL eye.
I don't really see what Microsoft has to do with it. Sure, the program runs in Windows, but it needn't. The actual transmission doesn't occur in Windows. The screen has to be wiped clean and resynced to DOS mode. It would be perfectly at home in DOS mode (MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, TRS-DOS, CP/M, what have you). The only way Microsoft makes this more convenient is that your planner data can be imported from MS Planner. But as the data is only 3 fields anyway, it's not that great an asset.
The watch back says "Made in Philippines," but the band was made in China. It seems like a lot of trouble to go through to get the product made. If they made both parts in the same country they could save on shipping and assembly overhead. But that's totally up to them. Maybe they got such a great discount and such cheap labor (20 cents/day for a family of 4? I guess that's a lot of money to them...) that it was cheaper in the long run. Maybe one of the employees of Timex is Chinese, so maybe they have relatives with a watchband factory in China. Or maybe the relatives are in Hong Kong, and they're the ones that made some cheap-ass deal with a watchband factory in mainland China. Who knows?
But it definitely works well and is easy to use. As a general guideline, you'll have no problem whatsoever if you are, say, comfortable with MS Excel, but even if you aren't, you'll still be able to get your data in and out.
In short, it's everything you'd expect. The watch is solid and easy to use. The transfer works near dreamlike. No way!
