The IBM WatchPad (2001)

Smartwatch, you say? Why, that's the buzzword of the day! You think Apple showed us the way? Better take a look at yesterday!

Not actual size

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THE IBM WATCHPAD

Mad Ducketts: The $500 Pac-Man Watch

My kind of smart watch.

OK, these things don't come up often on eBay and when they do, they're gone PDQ. It's the Nelsonic Pac-Man watch and back in 198-whatever, they were hot, very hot, since the Holy Grail of gaming at that time was to bring Pac-Man into the home, even if he was a three millimeter dot on an LCD screen the size of a postage stamp. Nelsonic, who still exists today but just makes boring old regular watches (boo!) produced two different models of the highly coveted Pac-Man watch - one with the tiniest little joystick you've ever seen, and another that employed basic directional buttons instead - apparently the tiny joystick was too easily lost or broken for them to keep producing. 30 years later, Nelsonic's game watches are just as hot as they were when they were new (albeit in a much smaller market) and right now there's one on eBay that hails from the U.K., so I guess you wear it on your other wrist. The starting bid for this electronic bad boy? Just £299.99. That's about $500 to us Yanks, and there's three days left on the auction so I'm pretty sure the price will go up from there. Check out the video below to see a demo of someone else's awesome watch and then click the link to drop some mad ducketts on my Christmas present…and please include a gift receipt if you can. Thanks!

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE LISTING FOR THE PAC-MAN WATCH

Forever Classic

Folks, the word "classic" gets thrown around quite a bit these days, and it gets applied to everything from failed soft drinks to disposable diapers. But once in a great while, a true classic turns up in my Google search results, a sturdy icon of its age blessed with the wherewithal to transcend both style and fashion and yes, even time itself - and that classic is the Casio Databank CA53W-1 watch, available now from selected online retailers. Casio's calculator/PDA-styled series of watches was introduced in 1983 with the Databank CD-40, one of the first watches of the 80s that allowed its user to store information. While later incarnations of the device eventually added PDA functions and increased memory capacity, the modern-day CA-53W-1 is not much different from the original standard calculator version and succeeds at capturing that classic Casio style in every rubberized micro-button. Here are the specs:


• 8-Digit Calculator
• Constants for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division
• Water Resistant
• Dual Time
• Daily Alarm
• 1/100 second stopwatch
• Measuring modes: Elapsed time, split time, 1st-2nd place times
• Hourly Time Signal
• Auto Calendar (pre-programmed until the year 2079)
• Approx. battery life: 5 years

So for less than 25 bones you can have the computing-equivalent of a Timex Sinclair 1000 (there's a post for a later time) strapped to your wrist and let me tell you, if you were seen at the mall in 1983 wearing one of these badboys you felt like you were in friggin' Star Trek! Most gnarly!


To go to directly to Casio's product page click HERE. Then you'll be able to finish your Marty McFly costume just in time for Halloween!