B-List Holy Grail: Wristphones
Part of a series: B-List Holy Grails
Wristphones
The wristwatch/phone hybrid used to be the way forward. Now it’d be considered clunky or annoying to use – either a case of too much bulk or no room for buttons – and associated with all sorts of bizarre RSI. The delicious irony is that today most people use mobile phones to tell the time.
Written by: Andrey Pissantchev
Poster Child:
Exactly! I don’t think it’s so much a failure as us realizing we’d rather not have a phone strapped to our wrist. Look at it another way- a cell phone is really a pocket watch converged with a phone. And a camera. And a calendar. And a datebook. And a rolodex.
Ryan:
I’m disappointed that we don’t have these too! But, as the author points out, we have the same functionality, it’s just added to the phone rather than the wristwatch.
Tim:
I used to coach debating full time, which meant a lot of staring at a coundown to check speech length. I took my watch off so often that I started just carrying it in my pocket. Then I got a phone with a timer function. I don’t have a wristphone, but I do have a pocketwatchphone.
What’s this all about?
In the waning days of 2009, Julian Dibbell mentioned videophones as a holy grail technology that ended up being a b-teamer. I liked the concept so much that I ran a contest on Quiet Babylon, looking for more examples.
This is one of the shortlist finalists as chosen by a panel of judges consisting of myself, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics and Project Wonderful and Street Artist Poster Child.
