Hold your arm so a watch strapped on top of your wrist would be facing toward your eyes for easy viewing of its display.
If you have a smartwatch, or any kind of watch, you do this many times a day.
Now hold your arm in that position for 30 or 60 minutes to watch an entire TV show. You can take a break during the commercials.
Enjoying that? Probably not.
With a [smart]watch, you only glance at it a bit here and there. You don't try to view it continuously.
It is interesting to see a very clever product idea that completely ignores human anatomy.
I'll also add that bubble-era Japan was full of novelty electronics like this. Companies were investing heavily in R&D, and even if sales weren't great, these kinds of items boosted prestige and reputations for being cutting edge.
I remember when we had the databank watches (in the 80s), we’d wear them on the inside of our wrists since they were easier to use. The arm is in a position not much different from holding a smartphone with one hand.
Then imagine, additionally, if your brain didn't seem to mind watching TV at an angle, since it always watches it at an angle, just on a different axis of rotation, anyway.
IDK, some things are cool and also _just_ useful enough to be a no-brainer if you have the money. Throw in James Bond ads and you get a social utility bonus. Lend it to a friend in exchange for someone's phone number, or whatever. It's good stuff in lots of ways.
Also, sometimes companies do things just to show off their capabilities to the market, especially Japanese companies. Sony were the kings of this tactics back in the day.
As a side note, in the typical western FM band allocation (88 - 108MHz), the analog TV audio carrier for channel 6 would be located just under that (at 87.7MHz), and since most radio receivers could go a little under and over that range, most people could listen to channel 6 audio on the go.
This generated an entire market of "TV" stations who's main purpose was to broadcast audio, in the United States they were nicknamed "Franken-FMs".
Even if it is a watch.
Of course if you're going to take it off your wrist for any serious viewing, they could have just put a bigger LCD on the tuner device itself, since you have to carry that anyway.
But that wouldn't have the "wow" factor of a TV watch!
I have no idea where he go the watch or how. They were a lower income family and lived in very modest circumstances but he always had the latest and greatest, brought it to school, caused a huge commotion, and would have the device taken away (think personal sized PacMan consoles, sling shots, those robot toys, etc).
It did work. The way it was used was a ton of kids would crowd around this guy and watch a grainy, poorly rendered, CBC program with faint sound (I recall a headphone jack), and we marveled at how cool it was that he could watch TV at school. Unfortunately, nothing interesting would ever be on, and the teacher took it away immeadiately.
One of the early feedback comments was that it was quite exhausting holding out the ipad for more than a minute at the time.
This comment resonates well!
I doubt you'd want to stand to watch regular TV, so why assume you'd be standing to watch a TV on your arm?
As a kid? Immensely.
I don’t know if many people enjoy it, but I see people do it every day. Sometimes you can
And you know, if the watch is really that uncomfortable when you’re holding it up for watching TV, you can even take it off!
> It is interesting to see a very clever product idea that completely ignores human anatomy.
I guess you don’t use, for example, laptops?
You would normally see people with portable TVs, so that they could see the TV broadcast, hear the color commentary, and catch instant replays. Having a watch with small dongle receiver, with low weight and low power consumption, is so much MORE convenient than lugging the shoebox-sized TV around.
I can imagine similar convenience on a train commute.
It could work for porn.
Neither requires you to pay full attention to your wrist for 30 minutes.
Not that this was a wildly successful product, but the point wasn't to watch a sitcom, complete with commercial breaks, without moving.
I would definitely be comfortable watching on my wrist.
Rotation is more comfortable the other direction. The under arm makes a lot more sense for a “smart”watch, or at least a device that requires input
That's basically the position when I hold my phone in my left hand anyway.
For many companies, I think that's the only kind of thing they care about.
You can remove it from your arm for longer viewing sessions.
I have a neighbor who only uses the touchscreen on their ThinkPad, except when they have to type something.
The other day I stopped by to help them troubleshoot a problem, and they had to do a password reset.
They touched the Old Password field on the screen and typed in their old password on the keyboard. They touched New Password on the screen and typed in the new one. Of course then they had to touch the second New Password field on the screen and enter it again on the keyboard. Finally they reached up to touch the OK button on the screen.
I mentioned that they could avoid going back and forth between screen and keyboard by using the Tab and Enter keys. They asked, "What are those?" I pointed them out on the keyboard and explained what they do.
We will see if the message got through. Hopefully with some gentle encouragement over time, it will.
My real point is that yes, some people do use touchscreen laptops.
Do you enjoy a keyboard that ruins your hands and a screen that ruins your back?
BTW, the usefulness of these tiny pocket TVs of the early 1980s was quite heavily contested. The Seiko interpretation of the theme had some going for it regarding the the show-off factor, which isn't to be discounted for when it comes to (expensive) novelty items.
We too easily get lost in, "but actually conspicuous consumption is kind of killing the planet" land as designers and consumer electronics has been sorely impacted as a result. How ironic it may be when a lack of technological and economic growth fueled by climate concerns ends up bankrupting the economy for renewables and permaculture.
I'd trade 5 Apple watches for a functional Japanese watch-TV from the 80s. Perhaps I should listen to myself speak sometimes.
Which is all to say, very young filmgirl would have loved this shit.
Unfortunately, there wasn't anything good on when I brought it into a car.
If you have an Apple Watch there's a new app called "WatchTube" that lets you watch YouTube on your watch, if you'd like to see if such a tiny video viewing experience is actually any good.
Here’s the app store link to save others multiple clicks:
Then I put it in a box and never looked at it again.
Now I don't need to worry about charging my watch every week nor do I have to think about finicky software.
The best tools are the ones that do their job so well you rarely have to think about them.
They're rated for 10-15 years though, so I guess I'll see how it's holding up in another six months.
not as cool as an actual tv watch but was fun.
"But that's just Facetime on your phone but on your wrist."
"What's wrong with current smart watches?"
You still need a smartphone on or near your person. Maybe sometimes I want to be available for contact without the rest of the dizzle-dazzle in a retrofuturistic manner [flip phones aside].
Also, I wonder where you could still use this thing after you paid ~500 $ for it. Are there any analog NTSC channels still broadcast over the air anywhere in the world?
Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and parts of Costa Rica are still using analog SD NTSC.
In El Salvador the delay was caused due to first proposing ATSC on the mid 2000s and then switching to ISDB in the mid 2010s for what I believe were 'political reasons'.
The first batch of TV sets sold were NTSC+ATSC. And only the newer ones are NTSC+ISDB. OTA digital TV has never been used by more than a couple of channels or for test transmissions.
I think we've leap frogged this technology though. There's still no analog shutdown date and HD content from the local TV stations is usually available in YouTube or Facebook live.
They could have a very popular consumer product if they had expanded this LCD to bigger dimensions (maybe, the size of a walkman, a very popular product at this time) and created a truly portable TV.
* Camera & Video recorder
* Calculator
* GPS
* Video streaming device (aka "TV")
* Game device
* Email and communication device
* Radio
* and so so so much more
Each one of these devices in the 1960s-1990s (even early 2000s) were multi-billion dollar industries in their own right.
Why can't we make a better one receiving FTA DTV and showing it on an OLED screen?
Smartwatches have had full HD h.264 and 720p h.265 hardware decode since at least 2014.
https://www.slideshare.net/jjwu6266/qualcomm-snapdragon-400b...
An Apple Watch sits at ~50k yen today.
Ok I’m not very versed about Bond movies but wtf. Not even trying to be subtle about being sexist.
It's never been subtle.
The number of Japanese men who'd wear a Seiko TV watch (or show whatever modern day equivalent signifier of inceldom) has grown significantly bigger than the number of Japanese men who display the traits that Japanese women would like to see in a partner.
