The Seiko TV watch

Try this exercise:<p>Hold your arm so a watch strapped on top of your wrist would be facing toward your eyes for easy viewing of its display.<p>If you have a smartwatch, or any kind of watch, you do this many times a day.<p>Now hold your arm in that position for 30 or 60 minutes to watch an entire TV show. You can take a break during the commercials.<p>Enjoying that? Probably not.<p>With a [smart]watch, you only glance at it a bit here and there. You don&#x27;t try to view it continuously.<p>It is interesting to see a very clever product idea that completely ignores human anatomy.

I don&#x27;t get it. If I still have to carry around a walkman-like thing, why bother with the watch? Why not put the screen on the walkman-like thing, and eliminate the wire through my sleeve?

My dad was a huge fan of Sony’s Watchman series of portable TVs. He had 2 or 3 different models. In the 1990s, I would steal them when I’d go on school trips in elementary school so I wouldn’t miss my TV shows. The limitation of antenna stuff made it less than ideal in a moving vehicle, but being able to watch Melrose Place on a bus in third grade instead of Homeward Bound or The Sandlot was pretty dope.<p>Which is all to say, very young filmgirl would have loved this shit.

I&#x27;ve always wanted one of these. Sadly, the LCD has failed in the majority of surviving examples, I believe the liquid part of the liquid crystal &quot;escapes&quot; over time.<p>If you have an Apple Watch there&#x27;s a new app called &quot;WatchTube&quot; that lets you watch YouTube on your watch, if you&#x27;d like to see if such a tiny video viewing experience is actually any good.

You have to admit Back in 1980s this was not only awesome but a must have gadget. Hard to visualise how awesome this before internet era. Completely futuristic. +10000

I went from a fitback back to a simple casio gshock and it was one of the better decisions I made this year.<p>Now I don&#x27;t need to worry about charging my watch every week nor do I have to think about finicky software.<p>The best tools are the ones that do their job so well you rarely have to think about them.

I remember watching this cartoon called Kochikame as a kid. One episode features a this guy who carries around a portable TV, watching all his TV shows as he goes around. That blew my mind. Such a thing clearly couldn&#x27;t exist, I thought back then, but just thinking about it made me giddy with excitement. Fast forward 13 years, and I carry such a device with me at all times. Its the stuff of fiction come materialized. Stories like this remind me to stay grateful for the amazing progress that has happened that sometimes goes unrecognized by us.

when I was in high school I had a casio watch that doubled as a TV remote control that was responsible for a lot of random power off&#x2F;change channel messages to the TVs at school...<p>not as cool as an actual tv watch but was fun.

Technically: with a built in display, the tuner+decoder part was in the device that you wore in your pocket.

I remember this fondly from Beyond 2000, the best show of the late 1980s.

Thought this was kind of neat when I first saw it, but I wanted a Sony Watchman more. Never got one, though. I&#x27;m still bitter about Santa not bringing me on that Christmas ...

With today&#x27;s technology, how might this translate into a functioning 1980s Dick Tracy Watch -- the upgraded version from the original &quot;radio watch&quot; which includes video communication as well.<p>&quot;But that&#x27;s just Facetime on your phone but on your wrist.&quot;<p>&quot;What&#x27;s wrong with current smart watches?&quot;<p>You still need a smartphone on or near your person. Maybe sometimes I want to be available for contact without the rest of the dizzle-dazzle in a retrofuturistic manner [flip phones aside].

Seiko used to be groundbreaking for its time, one such example is Seiko UC-2000 that could run BASIC and connect to keyboard and thermal printer module.

&quot;UKW&quot; radio is the German term for FM radio (which is broadcast over &quot;ultrashort&quot; or very high frequency &#x2F; VHF waves, &quot;Ultrakurzwelle&quot;, thus UKW). I wonder where that came from in the article?<p>Also, I wonder where you could still use this thing after you paid ~500 $ for it. Are there any analog NTSC channels still broadcast over the air anywhere in the world?

I can clearly remember reading about this watch in one of the &quot;innovations of the 1900s&quot;-books in the early 90s at my schools library. It was featured as the pinnacle of human technology and it sparked great imagination in the mind of me as a child when I read about it.

Funnily enough, at this time, &quot;portable TVs&quot; were bulky contraptions with mini CRT displays.<p>They could have a very popular consumer product if they had expanded this LCD to bigger dimensions (maybe, the size of a walkman, a very popular product at this time) and created a truly portable TV.

Well, hell, if the NHK man is going to squeeze that fee out of me, I might as well have 24&#x2F;7 access to the station I&#x27;m paying for...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;NHK_Party" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;NHK_Party</a>

What no one could forsee is how many different devices and gadgets the smart phone would subsume:<p>* Camera &amp; Video recorder<p>* Calculator<p>* GPS<p>* Video streaming device (aka &quot;TV&quot;)<p>* Game device<p>* Email and communication device<p>* Radio<p>* and so so so much more<p>Each one of these devices in the 1960s-1990s (even early 2000s) were multi-billion dollar industries in their own right.

Yeah, that&#x27;s nice and all, but the G757-5020 is still the best watch from that movie.

Pretty impressive feat for 1984.

One of the more annoying ways that I&#x27;ve seen a website hijack the back button.

So many cool things were pioneered in the 80s!<p>Why can&#x27;t we make a better one receiving FTA DTV and showing it on an OLED screen?

What is 100k 1983 yen in todays equivalent?<p>An Apple Watch sits at ~50k yen today.

resolution was very decent at 32k pixels.

Johnny Seiko and his Giant Robo

Obligatory “but can it run Linux” post

&gt;Octopussy<p>Ok I’m not very versed about Bond movies but wtf. Not even trying to be subtle about being sexist.

This feels like discovering a time capsule which holds the early signs of why Japanese women aren&#x27;t interested in Japanese men anymore.