The world's fashion magazines wait for the Apple Watch. Pebble and Kickstarter are pushing the $20 million dollar project of the Pebble Time and the Pebble Steel. Google and its partners are wondering what happens next with Android Wear. But long before these technological marvels, wearable technology dominated by another watch.
With everyone looking towards the wrist in 2015, can we learn anything from one of the world's first smartwatches, the ubiquitous Casio F-91W?
First of all, does it deserve the smartwatch moniker? I think it does. While we expect watches today to be able to relay information and notifications from a smartphone, to show multiple watch faces, and to have a long battery life; if we put aside the idea of a smartphone relay, the F-91W covers all the other areas.
Launched in 1991 when the smartphone was still almost a decade away - the first GSM digital network deployed the same year, so this was right at the start of the digital era of mobile communications - Casio continue to sell the watch to this day. While sales figures have never been released (Casio simply say it remains a 'huge seller') you could easily argue that this is the biggest selling watch in the world. It's certainly recognisable, functional, and opened up accurate digital timekeeping to almost every corner of the planet.
Based around a comparatively large LCD screen, the F-91W packs a lot of information on its home screen. Not only do you have the time as a twelve or twenty-four hour clock with the seconds also on display, you also have the day and date, as well as indicators for your alarm and hourly chiming. With an all-plastic construction and shipping with a plastic resin band (but using the standard connections if you want to switch it out) the F-91W weighs just 22 grams. There is a touch of tension around the wrist because of the band, but in terms of weight the watch is not noticeable.
The standard version is marked as 'Water Resist' by Casio, It will happily take on board any rain or water splashes during everyday use, but this is not a watch to take in the shower or go swimming with.
It also has a single LED bulb that illuminates the entire display. It's not a uniform light (for that you would need to F-105W which comes with an electroluminescent backlight) but it's enough to pick out all the LCD elements on the screen.
Both the light, and switching between the screens are actioned by one of three buttons, laid out in the classic Casio format. On th bottom left you have the mode button, which moves the display between the home time screen, the set alarm screen, the stopwatch, and the set time screen. The bottom right button lets you cycle between the options on each screen, with the top left button moving the selection around.
There's not a huge amount of on-screen help, so part of the challenge of using the F-91W smoothly is using muscle memory to switch between modes, screens, and setting alarm times. Once you do get everything in your head, it's incredibly quick and after years of using other digital watches it feels utterly natural.
As well as having a daily alarm that can be toggled on or off, there is also an hourly chime which can be toggled independently. This leads to the delightful noise of hourly chimes in a room full of F-91W owners. The quartz timing crystal is accurate to thirty seconds each month, which means that the hourly chime orchestra is never synchronised, leading to a wave of 'it's the top of the hour'!
The stopwatch is the big feature though. It made the F-91W a popular choice for runners looking to time themselves with a lightweight stopwatch. Being able to display a split time on-screen while the timer continues to run underneath the frozen display to be recalled as required was a huge advantage.
It might not be Flappy Bird, but the F-91W has games on board, just as a modern smartwatch does. Taking timings down to 1/100 of a second, the watch allowed a generation to replicate Roy Scheider's "can you stop the timer at exactly one minute without looking at the display?" psychological game from 'Blue Thunder'.
And then there is the key feature - battery life. While Apple apparently struggles to reach a full twenty-four hours of use and with some Android Wear watches managing two days, Pebble reckons its seven day battery life is a strong selling points. Well, Casio has a seven in the battery life of the F-91W, but it's not measured in days. Or Weeks. This smartwatch will run for seven years, even with regular use of the alarm and the LED light.
Twenty-five years after it first went on sale, the Casio F-91W remains one of the key digital products of the twentieth century, and it's continued retail life in the twenty-first century is testament to great design and a focus on useful features remains relevant to this day.
The modern smartwatch can learn a lot from Casio's wonder. Battery life is of course the key feature, and while a seven-year life is probably out of reach it's important to stretch endurance as long as possible. In terms of other features, Casio's intense focus on usable features is partly because once the design was locked in to manufacturing, it was impossible to change - the ability to update over the air is an advantage for smartwatch manufacturers but perhaps it makes them sloppy in terms of deciding what they want a watch to do.
But perhaps the biggest win for Casio is in style. Nobody was embarrassed to be seen with the F-91W on their wrist when it was first launched, and it did not look out of place with other timepieces. Fast forward to today and the watch is seen as a style icon, as a classically retro design, and even the mark of the hipster movement (even more so if you can find one of the coloured plastic variants).
The Casio F-91W provided generations with its first digital watch, it sold by the freighter load, it remains recognisable, and it changed how society looked at time. If that's not a definition of a smartwatch, then I don't know what is. If any of the current smartwatches can have even a quarter of the impact of the F-91W, they'll be heralded as a revolution.
It's just a shame that Casio got there first, twenty-five years ago.
(Now read why I love wearing a smartwatch).
