Hasta La Ideas

I’d recently heard that high school kids don’t wear watches anymore. A gross generalization to be sure, but the gist of the argument was that everyone uses their cellphones as timepieces and watches are viewed by the younger generation as superfluous.

Baby boomers, on the other hand, never can seem to get over those Dick Tracy comics they read as a kid, where the titular detective used his timepiece as a talkie. So once again we have a hi-tech watch concept being advanced, this time by Hewlett-Packard and Fossil. The MetalWatch concept, presented by HP’s CTO Phil McKinney, below, is intended to be the “aggregation point” for a variety of technological tools we use: E-mail, social networking, printers, etc. Unfortunately the video seems aimed squarely at the Boomer generation, as it’s a lot of talk with none of the de rigueur images, renderings, or video that typically accompanies a product concept:

So what do you think, is this something we’ll see in the future, or is the watch starting to lose its relevance?

And by the way, if it is true that the younger generation sees watches as a lapsed technology, the name “Fossil” is not doing that company any favors.

What time is it?

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