Wristwatches? Dead.

You can’t make wristwatches relevant again, guys.  But keep on trying, please, it’s amusing.

Randall Stross, Wristwatches, Reimagined - Will Young Shoppers Care?

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.

[…]

Mr. McKinney, who is 50, said that young consumers who are unaccustomed to wearing watches would still find the MetaWatch appealing. They’d use it, he said, for purposes other than timekeeping. “I hit a button and — boom — I’m checked in at Foursquare,” he offered as an example.

(‘Boom!’ has been forever taken over by Takahito Iguchi, due to his Launch presentation, so no one can say it like that to me anymore.)

McKinney is missing the point, which is people will be checking in with mobile devices, not a wristwatch.

The only hope is to focus on the jewelry/fashion market, and forget about the techies. They are lost forever.