It was a commercial flop

Years later, the cellphone would become an ubiquitous, multifunctional device that,

incidentally, showed the time. As a result, many people younger than a certain age have never

acquired the habit of wearing a wristwatch. That's hardly news, but here's what does

surprise: H.P. and a few other companies are talking up wristwatches again, almost as if the

cellphone had never appeared. It's an idea that strikes me as oblivious to the consumer

electronics landscape.

Last month at an H.P. event in Shanghai, Phil McKinney, the chief technology officer of the

company's personal systems group, displayed the MetaWatch, a prototype developed by Fossil

that he described as the first generation of "the connected watch."

This version has Bluetooth, but the long-term vision is to give it the wireless capability to

be the hub of every Internet-ready portable device you own — phone, laptop, tablet. The

MetaWatch would be "the mobile Wi-Fi hotspot on your wrist," Mr. McKinney said in the

presentation.

During an interview this month, he told me that he gave a talk in 2006 about his conception

of the "connected watch" of the future. At the time, wireless carriers were saying that all

kinds of digital devices, including laptops, would join cellphones in having their own built

-in wireless radios for connectivity.

"Why not take all the radios and aggregate them into one device?" he suggested then. That one

device would be the wristwatch.

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