Challenges in Designing Watch Phones

Watch phones are in the market for quite some time now, but have not been very popular. As the name suggests, these devices are electronic instruments which can be tied to the wrists and function both as a mobile phone as well as a watch. Since the watch function is traditionally in-built in a mobile phone, watch phones should be considered more as small electronic devices which can be tied to the wrist.

The idea behind developing wrist watch phone is to perform full mobile phone functionality using only a wrist watch sized device. However, this is easier said than done as it requires cutting edge technology to fit all the hardware in such a small space. Moreover, the overall design is required to be user-friendly so that various functions like, making voice calls, storing contact information can be easily and efficiently handled.

Expectations from Wrist Watch Phones

One of the important technological challenges in designing watch cell phones is that usual input devices like mouse or keypads cannot be fit into such small size. Therefore most of the watch phones available today use touchpads for data input. Another technology that can come in handy is the speech recognition technology, which converts user speech commands to instructions. However, this technology is not very accurate and even a single digit mistake would result in wrong number getting dialed. Last but not the least, the watch mobile phones are required to be comfortable so that people can wear them for long hours like people do with their watches.

LG electronics has taken up these challenges and developed a decent watch phone, namely, LG GD910. The engineers from LG were able to put in enough processing power in the small space to support tri-band GSM and HSDPA communication. The watch phone’s touchscreen uses the capacitative technology, providing a very responsive screen within the small device. The screen has a resolution of 128×160. The device also has Bluetooth facility to communicate with the ear piece for making voice calls. The in-built speaker phone facility provides another option for voice communication.

Another type of watch with similar technological hurdles is made by Garmin. The garmin watch includes a GPS tracker within the watch and mainly used by marathon runners for track their running path.

Watch phones in general are good examples of technological advances achieved by electronic companies. However, as evident from their limited popularity, their use in day to day work is not clear. Since these device come at a steep price, there is little justification for buying them.

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