/ 2 April 2004

It’s not about the watch

So you ask yourself: what on earth am I going to do with a USB flash disk watch? I need my watch to tell the time. I need my watch to wake me up in the mornings, what now with the USB?

But it’s brilliant if you think about it. Where better to store your most treasured or secret Word documents, pictures or sound files than behind the hands of your watch, strapped to your very own wrist?

USB flash disks are nothing new. In the past few years, they have taken the world by storm. The beauty of these flash disks is the extreme ease at which they can be plugged into a PC or Mac and used to store and cart files around from one computer to another.

So it makes sense to have a flash disk in a wristwatch, where you can keep the information safe and on you all the time. The Mega Memory Watch, is being sold by Mark Shuttleworth’s Hip2B2, a spin-off company from his ‘First African in Space” mission.

After plugging the 128 megabyte watch into my PC via the USB cable, it was a simple case of copying across the files I wanted to store. I added a few of my most precious photos, my CV, a few MP3s and critical e-mails to it.

The bulky USB cable folds neatly into the watch strap, so when you are not using the cable, it can be hidden away. It’s a great-looking watch with a retro feel. The thin plastic strap feels a bit flimsy, although the metal front gives it an all-round solid look and feel. And this watch even tells the time.

You can’t help but feel there is a certain amount of science-fiction about all this. Will we soon see these things implanted in our bodies? Probably, yes. But not for a while, so there is no need to panic.

The Mega Memory Watch is available from Kalahari.net and YDE for about R799.