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Timex Beepwear Pro Watch

Features
The Board
  • Diameter: 45mm (1.77 in.)
  • Thickness: 14.8mm (.58 in.)
  • Weight (including strap and battery): metal band: 2.6oz / 74 grams leather strap: 1.5oz / 43 grams

Beepwear Site

(+,-) $179 USD

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8.5/10

If you find yourself on the go all the time you may have a hard time organizing all the necessary equipment to make sense of your life. While cellular phones are everywhere, what about those who don't always want to have to carry one or for whom it would be an inconvenience? Timex may have a great solution for you: the Beepwear Pro watch. Here's a quote right from their site: "It's a pager....it's a watch....it's an organizer....right on your wrist! " Need I say more? While the watches come in a non-pro model and several styles the unit sent to me by Timex was the Beepwear Pro #806-80011 which retails for $179 USD directly from Timex.

The Technology Behind the Beepwear Pro

The watch is equipped with an alphanumeric pager that can receive pages in most U.S. cities. Paging service is provided by Skytel, and at $10 a month that's a pretty reasonable rate for the convenience afforded by wearing you pager on your wrist. If you can receive Skytel's service in your area with a conventional pager you should have no problems with the Beepwear Pro. An interesting feature that arises out of this service arrangement is that the watch is automatically updated by Skytel to always have the correct time. Imagine my surprise when I first opened up the box the watch came in and it not only had the correct time…but also said I was in the den! How could it possibly know I was sitting in my den? Actually, the watch said "Den" - meaning that I was in the Denver time zone. After I got over the creepy Big Brother feelings I was quite impressed with the fact that the watch never needed to have its time set. Another plus is that the Skytel system is already set to the atomic clock…and therefore you always will be too. Setting up the watch to receive pages is accomplished using an included guide. The steps are easily laid out and it only takes a couple of minutes to get your watch working.

An interesting feature of the Skytel service is that you receive news and sports updates a couple of times a day. Want to know what the weather is like in Atlanta tomorrow? In the evening you will receive your weather update of most major U.S. cities. Some of my friends are sports fanatics and I became the life of the party since I could dictate the days final scores to them merely by reading my watch. When there were important breaking news stories the watch also had those. As sad as the news of the Concorde crash in Paris was, it was made more interesting to me since I was notified by my watch just after it happened. I actually sat and waited for CNN to start reporting the news of the crash. I doubt that Skytel will beat the major news sources regularly, but breaking news is definitely a nice feature to have in a watch.

As I write this there is a special offer for new signups that will allow you to have local service for $4.99 and national coverage for $19.99. Those are only for numeric coverage. Alphanumeric is listed as $9.99 for local coverage and there national coverage available although I don't have exact pricing. It is my understanding that you can switch from metro to nationwide coverage with the difference taken from your account. So although the watch is fully alphanumeric capable you may opt for the cheaper numeric rate, especially if you need national coverage. If you buy your watch from the Timex Beepwear Pro website you'll get your first three months of alphanumeric paging for free. Now that is a word I wish we heard more in the computer/hi-tech industry!

 





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