It is a Palm PDA in watch form - the original Palm
implemented as a watch in a 66 MHz 68000 in Dragonball form. As a young man the
thought of having a 66 MHz 68000 on your wrist would have been
mindblowing! I bought it off Amazon because I had a tip-off that they
were selling off their stock. I can't remember exactly how much I paid,
but it was in the region of £30, compared with the original
£150 asking price. Don't bother looking now, unless you fancy blowing £500!
The problem with the watch was that the battery would last for a day at
most. Having looked at the reasons why this might be the case, I came
to the conclusion that it was because Lithium Ion batteries don't have
a great shelf life and they don't like being deeply discharged, which
is exactly my situation.
The watch sat ignored for the best part of 18 months in a draw when I
gave up trying to keep it charged up. For some unknown reason, and as
an example of the best way in which my browsing of the web can end up
bringing unknown results, I came across this website
(Russian, but also contains a great repository of software) that
documents how to replace the battery with one from an iPOD shuffle. I
wasn't sure whether the back would go on (as some people
have made mods involving a 'huge' battery outside the case) but it
works great, just about fits into the existing case and has now been
running for 3 days and shows only slight battery use. Here is another
site with a slideshow of the replacement.
Anyway, having sorted the battery I couldn't find my Wrist PDA
installation CDROM. In a twist of fate (I would say bizarre but this
kind of thing happens all the time) I had seen my installation CD,
thought 'I must put that somewhere safe' and then promptly forgotten
where I'd put it. Searching online for the contents was fruitless -
Fossil don't have any reference to the fact that they made this thing.
So, here is a zip file
containing the necessary parts of the installation CD for English
users. I have stripped it of as much bloat as possible, so if you are a
Spanish or French user please email me and I'll sort you out a
multilingual version.
