Watch out from Timex

Bunhill

WHILE we are on modernity, a strange device has come to my notice. The Timex Datalink is not, the man from Timex assured me, a watch but "wrist technology". It feels as big as a soup dish, though it not as attractive. It can, however, do several things a soup dish cannot. It can keep your appointments, your chums' birthdays, 50 or so phone numbers, and it has five alarm settings in two time zones. It also tells the time. In other words, it is a personal organiser, only smaller.

The really mind-boggling bit is the way you get all this information into the watch . . . sorry, wrist technology. First you take your computer, and type all the information you want into a special programme. Then you hold the WT up in front of it and press a button. A pattern of lines flash on the screen, the WT bleeps for 20 seconds or so - and you are done.

Just how useful it is is another matter. An intriguing feature of the WT is that it is waterproof to a depth of 100m. This will be beneficial, surely, only when someone invents an underwater mobile phone for us to ring the numbers we can so easily look up.