The Current State of Wrist

I think we're just going to have to live withcharging these contraptions nightly, but they will still needs to handle enoughtalk and standby time to get us through the day.Reception. Even talking on the newest, most advanced mobilephones can be extremely frustrating. What kind of signal will we be able to geton our wrists?Privacy. Presumably, you will be able to use a headset with your first wrist-phone,but will fumbling with a headset every time you receive a call outweigh theconvenience of wearing your phone on your wrist?Size. With early adoption often comes conspicuousness, andplenty of eye-rolling from friends and significant others.Functionality. People have come to expect quite a bit fromtheir cell phones. Personally, I use mine extensively for talking, email, instantmessaging, SMS, pictures, personal information management, and a fair amountof web browsing, all with a nice QWERTY keyboard. That's obviously way too muchto fit on a wrist, and a lot to have to live without if I swap it for a wrist-phone.Fortunately, despite these challenges, the vision of convenient, instantly availablecommunication continues to inspire the most imaginative, innovative, and entrepreneurialamong us, and that vision has led to three fairly promising models.Viewthe Watch Report wrist-phone photo gallery.People have been fascinated with the concept of embedding communication devicesinto watches for years. There have been countless experiments, prototypes, demonstrations,promises, and even a couple launches. For a pretty comprehensive view of just abouteverything related to wrist phones out there, check out the WatchReport wrist-phone photo gallery.With everything that's being embedded into watches these days -- GPS receivers,cameras, thermometers, barometers, altimeters, TVs, MP3 players, remote controls,miniature globes, solar cells, PDAs, USB drives, FM receivers, voice recorders,even atomizers -- what's taking so long to get a viable mobile phone on our wrists?The key word here is viable. Reducing GSM technology to the size that it can becomfortably worn on the wrist is not so much the challenge as creating a productcompelling enough that it will replace or supplement the pretty impressive mobilephones most of us already use. Consider these factors:Battery life.