This design is at once stylish and minimal. The Ni is made entirely from stainless steel and features a polished finish, with horizontal grooves on the face and strap that give it a great look. The time progresses in one direction. Touch the upper button for an animation before the time is displayed. Each LED on the bottom line indicates two hours, the line above indicates a single hour, a combination presenting the current hour. Groups of 10 minutes are presented on the center row and single minutes on the upper two lines.

The Tokyoflash Ni will cost you $144 should you choose to put it in my Christmas stocking.

[Tokyoflash]

Micro Spy Kit-X2D - $18.75

This spy utility belt keeps all the latest spy tools at the ready. Four of the most secret tools for the budding secret agent: Micro Ear Light, Secret Agent Pen, Spy Micro Listener and Spy Motion Alarm. All on an easy to clip on, clip off belt.

The Micro Spy Kit-X2D is available from Amazon for $18.75.

Electronic Spy Listening Device - $51.95

Our Electronic Listening Device is so Powerful a Human Conversation Can be Heard over 300 Feet Away! The \”ears\” and \”eyes\” are powerful enough to hear from one end of a football field to the other. You can capture distant sounds (and voices) that would otherwise not be heard with the help of our sophisticated Electronic Listening Device. Imagine standing in the end zone of a football field and being able to hear what someone is saying at the other end! Outdoors men and field observers can tap into Nature\’s secrets like never before. Bird watchers and nature lovers will be thrilled at the sound quality of this ingenious listening device.

The Electronic Spy Listening Device is available from Gadget World for $51.95.

EyeClops Night Vision Infrared Stealth Goggles - $68.88

Enjoy the thrill of real night vision technology with EyeClops Night Vision stealth goggles! These super stealth goggles allow kids ages eight and older to see in absolute darkness using infrared illumination so they can explore the dark landscape around them. These fun goggles are the perfect companion for slumber party sleep-overs or camp-outs.

The EyeClops Night Vision Infrared Stealth Goggles are available from Amazon for $68.88.

Spy Sunglasses with Digital Camera - $75

A cool pair of sunglasses supplied with a digital camera to attach to the side, and a hand held remote control to actually take the pictures. This is something that Bond would like to get his hands on!

The Spy Sunglasses with Digital Camera is available from Spy Catcher of Knightsbridge for $75.

Wireless Bullet -Size Hidden Color Spy Camera - $75

The \”Bullet\” 2.4Ghz Wireless Camera with Audio incorporates a tiny colour video camera, a highly sensitive microphone, and a 2.4 Ghz transmitter in a tiny bullet shaped capsule! And at a great low price. Its size makes it ideal for discreet surveillance. Now you can investigate your own suspicions with ease! The wireless technology means there are no wires to conceal and installation is minimal!

The Wireless Bullet -Size Hidden Color Spy Camera is available from VizonTech for $75.

R/C Spy Car - $129.99

Something is going on in the breakroom. You walked by and thought you heard your name whispered as well as the word \”cake.\” It\’s imperative that you discover what\’s going on. So you do the only thing you can do: you sit comfortably at your desk and deploy your R/C Spy Video ATV-360.

The R/C Spy Car is available from Think Geek for $129.99.

Remote Control Photo Reconnaissance Plane - $199.95

Modeled on a modern AWACS jet, this remote control plane has a detachable digital camera that takes still photos from hundreds of feet above the ground, allowing you to reconnoiter your area. The camera records up to 26 VGA (640 x 480 resolution) photos at the push of a button which can then be easily downloaded to any PC.

The Remote Control Photo Reconnaissance Plane is available from Hammacher for $199.95.

Wireless Remote Controlled Pan And Tilt Surveillance Camera - $249.95

This is the remote-controlled surveillance camera that pans and tilts at a touch of a button for a range of motion unavailable in lesser cameras, and it sends crystal clear images and audio to an LCD on the handheld remote, allowing real-time monitoring from up to 330\’ away. Unlike cameras rooted in a fixed position, this one pans 210° and tilts 63° for an optimal field-of-view.

The Wireless Remote Controlled Pan And Tilt Surveillance Camera is available from Hammacher for $249.95.

Control From Anywhere Home Sentry - $299.95

This robotic sentry can be controlled by any remote device capable of browsing the internet, allowing you to monitor your home from anywhere in the world. Audio and high-resolution (640 x 480) video are streamed in MPEG4 format, and it can take still pictures and e-mail them to you; it has a two-way microphone and speaker that enable real-time interaction with subjects.

The Control From Anywhere Home Sentry is available from Hammacher for $299.95.

Wireless Spy Watch Video Camera w/ DVR - $399

Our covert wireless spy camera wristwatch contains the latest in miniaturized wireless video technology - squeezing a full color video camera, microphone, power source and a 2.4GHz transmitter inside a stylish wristwatch. And the watch works tooJ

The Wireless Spy Watch Video Camera w/ DVR is available from David Steele for $399.

Tokyoflash is back to befuddle you with their latest wristwatch called Ni. This design will merge stylish lines and custom curves, offering a totally radical method of telling the time. The Ni is made entirely from stainless steel with a polished finish, where crisp horizontal grooves on the face and strap provide a seamless, unbroken appearance that is easy on the eyes. We'll save you the trouble of trying to figure out for yourself on how to read the time with the following tips.

The display moves across the face in a sweeping manner, with the time progressing in the same direction. A single touch of the upper button sends the lights into a sparkling animation before the time is displayed. Each LED on the lowest line indicates two hours, the line above indicates a single hour, a combination presenting the current hour. Groups of 10 minutes are presented on the centre line and single minutes on the upper two lines. The date can be read in a similar manner with second touch of the upper button. Subtle etched graphics on the face make reading the time easy. You can choose from blue, red and green or white LEDs.

The Tokyoflash Ni can be yours for $144 - you can always choose this as an early Christmas present.

Permalink: Tokyoflash Launches Ni from Ubergizmo (US, FR) | Good deals | Hot: Storm Review

Long answer short: They prefer to present a smiling face to the world.

The back story, from Adam Andrew Newman's interesting article in today's New York Times: photographing watches with their hands at 10 and 2 is meant to make prospective readers think, "The watch is smiling."

"Watches in the 1920s and 1930s were almost exclusively set at 8:20."

Not any more, in the age of the dreaded smiley face.

Why Time Stands Still for Watchmakers

The Ulysse Nardin wristwatch in an ad in the most recent Sunday edition of The New York Times is unlike 22 of the 24 watches featured in that issue’s ads, but chances are that didn’t register with most readers. For horologists, however, whose scrutiny of watches tends toward the Talmudic, it’s a lapel grabber: all the other watches — from brands like Rolex, TAG Heuer and Gucci — are set at 10:10, but Ulysse Nardin’s watch is set at 8:19. (The only other exception is an Oris wristwatch, one of four featured in an ad by the retailer Tourneau, which is set at 8:03.)

In a recent check of the 100 top-selling men’s dress watches on Amazon.com, which included models from 20 brands, all but three watches were set to 10:10. To be watch-shopping online and first notice that every model arrayed on the screen is set to an identical time can feel like crossing over into the Twilight Zone.

But the explanation turns out to be a simple matter of aesthetics.

Because brand names generally are centered on the upper half of a watch, hands positioned at 10 and 2 “frame the brand and logo,” said Andrew Block, executive vice president at Tourneau, the watch retailer, which has 51 stores worldwide. “It’s almost like an unwritten rule that everyone understands to photograph a watch a 10:10.”

•

In previous eras, the more popular time in ads was 8:20, which shared the attributes of being symmetrical and not overshadowing logos, but hands pointing down struck some as, well, a downer.

“It has the aesthetic of the smiley face to be 10 past 10, so we try whenever possible to opt for that,” Susanne Hurni, head of Ulysse Nardin’s advertising and marketing, said from the company headquarters in Le Locle, Switzerland. She says the company occasionally makes exceptions, as it does for models now advertised in publications including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, when watches have secondary dials and windows — for the day of the week, calendar day and year — that would be obscured by the hands at 10 and 2.

Klaus Peter Mager, a spokesman for Swatch, said his 25-year-old company, based in Biel, Switzerland, has always photographed watches primarily at 10:10, because “they’re smiling instead of a sad man’s face.” About 30 percent of the more than 400 models Swatch introduces yearly are photographed set at different times so that the hands don’t obscure functions, he said.

But Timex never deviates, even if that means the hands block features, said Adam Gurian, president of Timex, which is based in Middlebury, Conn. The company has an official time, 10:09:36, at which every watch — even digital models — is photographed for marketing purposes. Having the second hand at 36 tends to accommodate secondary language — like “Indiglo,” its dial-lighting technology — which appears centered at the bottom of watches.

To preserve batteries, the company ships many watches turned off at 10:09:36, which lends synchronicity to Timex displays in store windows.

At Rolex, watches are always photographed at 10:10:31, and for models that list the day of the week and calendar day, it is always Monday the 28th. A survey of hundreds of vintage wristwatch print ads posted online — in galleries at Adclassix.com, at the watch enthusiast site TimeZone.com, and on eBay — indicates that 10:10 was not always the norm. Watches in the 1920s and 1930s were almost exclusively set at 8:20.

The Hamilton Watch Company was among the first to clock in at 10:10; that time is favored in ads dating at least as far back as 1926. Rolex began consistently setting watches in ads at 10:10 in the early 1940s. Timex appears to have begun the transition in 1953, when its Ben Hogan model showed 8:20 while the Marlin model was set to 10:10.

Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive of the Kaplan Thaler Group, a New York advertising agency, learned about the 10:10 rule when her firm worked on a campaign for Rolex several years ago, and was drawn to the notion that it was like a smile.

“In advertising we would never expect someone to look at a watch and say, ‘The watch is smiling,’ but it’s just a feeling you get,” said Ms. Kaplan Thaler, co-author, with Robin Koval, of “The Power of Nice,” which features a big smile on its cover. The watch theme, she added, is typical of “subconscious cues that are used in print ads.”

•

Watchmakers are, naturally, fretting over how to sell watches to a generation that is in the habit of consulting their phones for the time, so it is perhaps fitting that the most-hyped phone has its own time-related intrigue. Many bloggers have wondered why the time on the iPhone in commercials, with few exceptions, reads 9:42 a.m., even when the capability being highlighted on the phone — like watching the “Pirates of Penzance” and being compelled to order calamari from a seafood restaurant — might seem atypical behavior over the day’s first cup of coffee.

The most popular theory is that it was 9:42 a.m. Pacific Time when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at a MacWorld conference in 2007, a fact confirmed by live blogs from the conference, but two press officers from Apple did not return calls seeking an explanation.

Watch companies, meanwhile, have the unenviable task of creating ads that will be dissected by aficionados, who are by nature obsessed with precision. Ms. Hurni of Ulysse Nardin learned this painfully more than a decade ago, when preparing a watch with day, month and year features for a shoot. Ms. Hurni always sets the calendar date as much as a year ahead, ensuring that the ad will not look dated, but after she set the watch in an ad several months ahead to Sunday, March 19, 1996, some customers sent calendars to the company’s Swiss headquarters to underscore that March 19 would actually fall on a Tuesday.

That makes sense to Michael Sandler, the general manager of TimeZone.com, who several years ago noticed that an out-of-focus model in the background of a Patek Phillipe ad was wearing her watch upside down, a slip-up he doubts was recognized by nonhorologists.

“Watch geeks are interesting people,” Mr. Sandler said. “They’ll pick up on weird stuff like that from an ad.”

No, I didn't forget that I invoked Amazon in the headline up top, nor Chekhov's 1889 admonition that "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."

FunFact: In 2000 Jeff Bezos flipped the "frowny" curve under Amazon's name on its logo, adopted in 1998,

upside down so as to make it a smile and hopefully carry with it all that such an expression conveys.

You could look it up.

Manufactured by Citizen, the Hello Kitty Swarovski 2009 Wristwatch is designed by Vabane in Italy. This watch available from gizmine.com with pricing set at $560. Available in pink and white, the watch is water resistant.

Read | Via

LG recently announced the latest companion of its popular Prada Phone II (a.k.a LG-KF900), the LG-LBA-T950 Bluetooth Wristwatch. Apart from showing the current time, this watch is also capable of communicating with your LG-KF900. Including reading SMS and email, as well as displaying the current caller info. Pretty useful I guess.

Regarding LG’s Prada Phone II cell phone, it features 3G/HSDPA connectivity, WiFI, an integrated 5 megapixel camera module with autofocus, a 3-inch touchscreen display with 400×240 resolution, and a slide QWERTY keyboard.

Apparently, there's a whole field of alternative medicine called magnotherapy, which claims that exposing the body to permanent magnets will help you heal. While you take a moment to recover from falling off your chair while cracking up, allow me to introduce Field & Stream's Magno-Therapy wristwatch.

Here's the deal: people who buy into magnotherapy often wear magnetic bracelets for their supposed health effects. If you wear a watch, that means hardware on both wrists. But you can ditch the bracelet if you have the Magno-Thearpy watch (Model F403GKBSM), which mounts permanent magnets in the metallic watchband. Each of the 14 magnets has a strength of 1,200 Gauss (which presumably means something to you if you actually believe this stuff), and the watch movement is shielded from their effects. Golfers will particularly like that the crown is on the left side of the bezel, giving the wearer more freedom of movement in the wrist.

Magnotherapy nuts enthusiasts can get some Tesla on their wrists for just $195. A ladies version is available for the same price.

Via Field & Stream

Filed under: Cellphones

LG's fashionable Prada II (and watch) gets shown to the camera originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Yesterday's list of Five Gadgets That Were Killed by the Cellphone proved rather popular. It also provoked a lot of response, some in the more traditional form of hate mail* and some offering suggestions for yet more victims of the cellphone's relentless growth. Here are few of the things we didn't include, yet have certainly been clobbered by the gadget widow-maker that is the mobile phone.

Photo: artzy.viva/Flickr

The Pager

The most popular suggestion was the pager:

5 gadgets? How could you forget the ubiquitous pager? In the not too distant past no drug dealer would leave home without it. The pager was the number one casualty of the rise of the cellphone. – Lenny

I couldn't put it better, Lenny. The beeper was indeed killed by the mobile, and rightly so: Not only were you always on call, you had to find a payphone in order to ring back, and you had to pay for it.

It offered some advantages, though -- doctors could go out to dinner in a fancy restaurant and be called off to work just after ordering (every medical drama made in the 1990s) and, on the other side, patients awaiting transplants could be tipped-off the moment the organs were in stock. All in all, though, a text message is a lot quicker and easier.

The Wristwatch

I still wear a wristwatch, although more as jewelry than as a time-telling tool. In fact, judging by the number of unusable watches our own Danny Dumas buys from Tokyo Flash, it's probably safe to say that watches don't even need to tell the time anymore. The cellphone may not have killed the watch, but it has certainly made it less essential. That hasn't stopped the likes of Vertu trying to hawk overpriced "luxury" cellphones to the same people that buy Rolexes.

Pocket Calculator

I got a surprising amount of suggestions for this one, and I actually considered putting it on yesterday's list. But although the cellphone will add, subtract and everything else, the keypad just isn't up to the task.

Anyone who adds up in a professional capacity (accountants, bar managers, shop owners) will always prefer a big, solid desktop calculator. Those things are accurate, and above all, fast. You try tapping $100,000 worth of recepts into a cellphone and see how long it is before you throw the thing out the window.

Alarm Clocks

True. Although an iPod also makes a pretty good alarm clock, and it doesn't irradiate your head as you sleep.

SatNav

Another great suggestion. GPS is finding its way into more and more phones, and even those that don't have it can guesstimate your position using cell-tower triangulation. The problem is that many phones need a network connection to actually pull down a map, whereas standalone SatNav devices store everything on-board and only need to connect to the satellite.

This means that a phone makes a pretty bad GPS device when you are out in the wilds -- arguably where you need it most.

Books

Here at Gadget Lab, we're fans of reading books on the iPhone, but we still don't think the book is anywhere near dead. For starters, the screens on cellphones just don't cut it as e-readers (although the iPhone gets close with a decent size and high 163ppi resolution). Heck, even purpose-built e-readers aren't there yet.

One day, though, the dead tree version will be obsolete, but we give it some years yet. The irony? Tiny text files are perfectly suited to small, low power devices.

Handheld Consoles

Will the phone kill the Gameboy? Perhaps. Nokia tried it with the taco-shaped N-Gage and failed. Apple is trying with the iPhone, and doing OK. But in the US the Nintendo DS is the second best selling console for October, beaten only by the Wii. Nintendo is shifting around half a million of them every month. That doesn't sound like a dead market.

What's certain is that the cellphone is becoming the default device for more and more things, slurping up other gadgets like a a giant Katamari Damacy ball. It might not be the best tool for a given job, but it's certainly the most convenient.

*The best hate mail was this one:

(You are so full of s**t that I hope they do not pay you to write your dribble and some [...] Gandpa [sic] my ass----who are you a young punk who cannot get a job except for writing???

It's often true that something nerdy is so astounding or self-aware that it becomes cool by virtue of its novelty or attitude. The Flüd Boombox digital watch takes this conceit and runs with it—off a cliff.

One imagines a humming server room, green LEDs twinkling behind blue ropes of CatV. Experienced networking hands pluck tufts of insulation from under their Tokyoflash timepieces. A young new IT hire, fresh from Cisco academy, hurries in to proudly show off his awesome boombox watch.

There are smiles that do not reach the eyes, and silence.

Retro Boombox LCD Wrist Watch [Epotpourri]