Bluetooth Watches: Bluetooth is Finally Developing Into More than Headset Connection

The recent development of Bluetooth watches from Fossil are a positive sign that Bluetooth may make a greater difference to our mobile lives than just allowing wireless headsets. While other companies like Seiko have also come up with Bluetooth-equipped watches of their own, Fossil has made them stylish, basing the new gadgets on already-popular designs in their existing watch lineup.

While they seem to be focused on Sony-Ericsson phones right now, a wider support for phone manufacturers (isn't Bluetooth about standards and interoperability?) could advance their popularity.

Why is this significant? Well, for the users of Sony-Ericsson phones, they no longer have to even touch their phone or pull it out of their pocket. Their watch can tell them who's calling, and will allow them to silence or reject the call right from the watch. If they choose to answer the call, they can answer it with their headset, leaving their phone completely untouched.

The increasingly advanced features of today's mobile phones sometimes seem to get in the way of the basic task of making and receiving phone calls while on the run. Now the potential exists for segmenting this functionality from the phone, using it as a hub for its most common task, and therefore making the interface for phone calls much more intuitive. When you can answer and place calls (even with voice dialing!) without even needing the phone to be in your hand, that's a dramatic improvement in how intuitive our communications can become. Then the phone's onboard user interface could be tuned even further to allow the advanced features to be less confined by the constraints of the phone form factor.

If I hadn't just gotten my Motorola E815 (I know, it's an older model, but it's well-documented on Howardforums and is therefore very customizable) I would be considering adopting this suite. Perhaps future models will allow interoperability with Motorola phones, although that probably depends on what Bluetooth profiles are enabled on the phones themselves.

And to those who like to repeatedly point out on Slashdot that they left watch-wearing behind when they realized they could just pull their phone out of their pocket to check the time, I can now point out that if you get one of these watches (and you are lucky enough to have the right phone...) you really don't even have to take the phone out of your pocket to answer calls or check the time anymore.