Skip to navigation | Skip to content

Dick Tracy phone a slight of wrist

The watch phone

The watch phone - image Samsung

A phone so small you can wear it on your wrist will soon be on the market in Australia.

Australia will become one of the first countries in the world to begin distributing the Dick Tracy-style watch phone when it is launched next month for the Olympic games. Produced by the Korean-owned company Samsung, the wrist phone is the latest effort to crack the fiercely competitive Australian mobile phone market.

Weighing in at a tiny 50 grams, the watch phone measures just less than 7 x 6 x 2 cm. It has voice activated dialling, a speaker, earpiece and vibrating alert. The voice activation allows it to accept 50 names and numbers via a touch screen or voice command.

The voice-sensitive technology is a significant move forward, as it will eventually allow people access to the Internet without having to use a keyboard.

Samsung showcased its wrist phone technology to the world late last year in Las Vegas, with the help of crew members from the original Star Trek television series. However the year before, Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone had already trialled prototype wristphones with the 40-member Japanese Olympic Committee at the Winter Olympics in Nagano.

One problem with earlier model watch phones has been the low-power nature of the devices. This meant the user needed a clear line of sight to a base station. Phones also had trouble maintaining a connection in rapidly moving vehicles such as cars or trains. These earlier watch phones were based on GSM technology (Geosatellite Positioning for Mobile), which has been the standard for mobile phones up until recently.

A spokesperson for Samsung Electronics said the new watch phone used the recently introduced CDMA technology (Code Division Multiple Access). Rather than sending the signal as a continual stream (which is what GSM does), it breaks up the digital signal and sends it in packets. He said CDMA technology gave much better call coverage and access, and the system has been operational in Korea with no problems.

In a world which can never make enough phone calls, Samsung will also release a range of other new phone based technologies. These include a TV phone, a digital camera phone, and an MP3 phone which incorporates enough memory to store eight songs or data files.

Les Chapman, director of Samsung Australia's telecommunications division said all of the phones, the heaviest of which is just 158 grams, would retail around $1,000.