Fossil delays the Palm OS wristwatch PDA again

Plans for Fossil Inc.’s Palm OS-based smart wristwatch are back to square one, as the version that was expected to be out in the middle of last year has been shelved in favor of a less expensive and more powerful version of the watch now scheduled for release in the middle of this year, Fossil said Wednesday.

Fossil has experienced a number of problems over the past year regarding the 1-inch display of the Wrist PDA (personal digital assistant) with Palm OS (operating system), according to a company spokesman. The LCD (liquid crystal display) partner that Fossil and manufacturing partner Flextronics International Ltd. chose for the Wrist PDA was unable to deliver a display that met minimum quality standards, he said.

“We’ve had to make the hard decision over the past month to basically redesign the product,” the spokesman said. “We’re using this timeframe to further reduce costs and raise performance specifications so we can launch a more competitive product by the summer of 2004,” he said.

Fossil declined to release the name of the LCD display manufacturer. The Wrist PDA was supposed to ship last year, but several delays related to the display plagued the product’s introduction, the spokesman said. An inferior touchscreen material was chosen for the display, and the backlight could have failed over the long term, he said.

The problems with the display have been responsible for the delays last year and this quarter, the spokesman said. A representative from Flextronics did not immediately return an e-mail message and phone call seeking comment.

The Wrist PDA with Palm OS allows users to do just about everything they could do with a Palm OS-based PDA. Fossil, which makes watches of the more normal variety, garnered rave reviews for its Wrist PDA when the product was introduced at Comdex in 2002 where it won a Best of Comdex award.

The company lists two types of smart watches on its Web site, the MSN Wrist Net and the Wrist PDA. Fossil is taking orders for several versions of the MSN Wrist Net with an expected ship date of next Wednesday after that product was also delayed in November.

The MSN Wrist Net is powered by Microsoft Corp.’s Smart Personal Objects Technology, and was featured in Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates’ keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. It uses a different display supplier, the spokesman said.

The new version of the Wrist PDA with Palm OS will ship with higher performing components in order to be more competitive with regular PDAs currently available, the spokesman said. It will cost less than the US$275 list price of the Fossil Sport, or the $295 list price of the Fossil Casual and Fossil Dress Wrist PDAs that had been available for preorder on Fossil’s site and through Amazon.com Inc., he said.

Fossil is working with Amazon to “take care of” any customers that preordered the watches, the spokesman said. He declined to comment on whether any refunds had been made.