Unless you’re a fan of high-tech jewelry, few things are as irksome as an overblown wristwatch design (we’re looking at you Tokyoflash ). While a binary timepiece will certainly up your geek cred, it’s not very useful for providing at-a-glance information. Robert Dabi’s Zero concept above, however, remains simple, beautiful, and amazingly enough, useful , all that same time. Practical too if he can coax a batch of round LCD displays into a production run.

Some watch manufacturers think adding a sapphire crystal face, compass or having a diving depth of 1,000m is enough. Me? I won’t consider strapping something to my wrist unless prehistoric animals have been set in the dial. More

Some watch manufacturers think adding a sapphire crystal face, compass or having a diving depth of 1,000m is enough. Me? I won’t consider strapping something to my wrist unless prehistoric animals have been set in the dial. More

Ready for your daily dose of ingeniousness ? That word is actually real, and so is the Happy Hour Timepiece — a watch that doubles as a bottle opener, because as the tagline reminds us, “it’s 5 o’clock somewhere .” It has just become available to buy from Time Tap’s website, and its black leather-strapped awesomeness can be yours for $49.95. Click past the break to see video of it being demonstrated as well as a shot of the watch face itself — it even has dual digital and analog time displays, so much value! Continue reading Happy Hour watches open bottles, doors unto new worlds (video) Happy Hour watches open bottles, doors unto new worlds (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Right now, augmented reality is pretty much just geeks talking into PCs while wearing Optimus Prime masks. But in the not-so-distant future, it will alter the way we experience the world every moment of the day. The following video is just a marketing concept for Nooka watches , but the idea is fairly sound. Clip out a placeholder watch, log on to their site and actually try products on. John Biggs calls the interface “an amazing idea…someone better patent it before Trojan and Victoria’s Secret get their hands on it.” Not to state the obvious, but something tells me those other products won’t involve hands at all, John.

The flagship toy in Jakks Pacific’s new SpyNet line is the Secret Mission Video Watch , a piece of wearable tech that lets spies-in-training covertly record video and audio and upload those sensitive materials to a secure website for further analysis. For my generation, Macaulay Culkin’s use of the Talkboy in Home Alone 2 was the single most glorious realization of usable spy technology that we had ever seen. Following in its lineage, the chunky SpyNet watch—no, I don’t have baby hands—actually gives kids real spying capabilities: the ability to shoot up to 30 minutes of video, 2 hours of audio, or 2000 pictures with a built-in camera for playback on the watch’s color screen. OK, it’s not going to be HD-quality, “enhance, enhance ” type stuff, but from the demo I saw, the recorded footage is definitely good enough for some low-stakes familial blackmail.

Looking to get a Bluetooth earpiece without actually upping your tool factor by 40x or so? Good luck. Helium Digital’s so-called alternative (that’d be the HDBT-990 Bluetooth wristband ) was recently reviewed by our iPhone-lovin’ pals in the Great White North, and while they found it to work well when it came to handling calls without actually using the speaker and microphone within the iPhone 3GS, everything else about it was ho hum at best. There’s no inbuilt LCD for watching Caller ID streams, the mini-USB jack was “flimsy,” and there’s still the issue of this unit being at least somewhat unsightly.

The watch this guy’s wearing was made by Armatix, the same company who designed his high-tech gun. Poor fellow can’t ditch the ugly accessory though, because the $10,000 weapon won’t fire without it. Basically the gun is disarmed and a red LED lights up unless the corresponding watch is close enough to send a wireless signal. While I really don’t see a high demand for it, Armatix’s .22cal weapon will be shipping next month for 7,000 euro, which is just under 10k in Washingtons.

There aren’t many watches out there that can draw a crowd, but Geoffrey Cooper’s “Geocentric” has that potential. The passage of time is represented much like the Earth revolving around the sun. The rings, which are in constant motion, revolve around the face of the watch to display both the hour an the minutes. So far as I can tell, Geocentric is still in the design/prototype phase, but I think it has what it takes to be a great product. [ Geoffrey Cooper via The Design Blog ]

If only I had testosterone floating through my body instead of estrogen, I’d be wearing this watch. Available on pre-order now, for $250. [ Watchismo via BoingBoing ]