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Have you ever wanted to check to see if anything important has come in on your phone or change the track on your iPod but then stopped because you frankly can’t be bothered.
If you have felt that, you have also probably thought, at some time, that having a watch is quite a nuisance but then, should you dispense with your watch, you don’t want to be fishing in your pockets for your gadgets to see what the time is.. annoying isn’t it.

My proposed solution is the FredTec wrist controller Model 1 (or just the M-1) which, in my rough prototyping, looks like a minimalistic wrist watch with three buttons down one side. The screen can light up red, yellow or green and the buttons can also light up.

You can bind your M-1 together with up to three bluetooth devices (one to each button), the idea being you would bind one or two phones (e.g. a business phone and a personal phone) along with an mp3 player and this would give you the power to monitor and control them just by looking at your wrist.

Phones

Once your phone is bound via bluetooth, you can select the button you bound it to and the screen changes to a menu of three options: “General”, “Silent” and “Off” which will set your phone to the respective mode using one of the three buttons.
When you get an incoming call, the M-1′s screen will light up red (if it is from someone in your address book, else, yellow) and begin to vibrate, then, after a while, your phone will go off in it’s normal manner, in silent mode, only the vibrate part happens. A graphic on the watch’s face will also tell you what is going on (a ringing phone animation, for instance). When the phone starts ringing, the buttons become the options to: Silence the phone, have it go directly to answer machine and just reject the call.

When a notification is triggered, the button linked to the device also lights up, this will tell you whether it is your work phone or your personal one that has gone off.

A note on colours
Red indicates something important that requires immediate attention, this includes: Incoming calls from people in your address book and the power failing in one of your devices.
Yellow indicates things that require your attention but not immediately, i.e: Calls from people you don’t know, low battery, missed calls or SMS/MMS/Email from someone you know.
Green indicates anything you might want to know but doesn’t matter if you read it or not, i.e: Fully charged and messages from unknowns.

iPods

The M-1′s main function with iPods is mostly limited to controlling it. For iPods without bluetooth, it comes with a bluetooth attachment which can also connect to bluetooth headphones. When you select the button your iPod is attached to the menu buttons change to: “Play/Pause”, “Next track” and “Volume”. Volume could either cycle between three preset volumes or put you down to another menu where you could go up and down by a set increment (for the second, hold down the button).

When you get an incoming call the watch will tell the iPod to make some kind of tone and pause until you either take the call or silence/reject the call.

When cycling volume, the graphic on the watch cycles through the three volume presets and only when left for a short while does it change, this avoids having to go through your loud setting to get to the quiet one.

Have your say

Please leave a comment to tell me what you think of this, how you would improve it and, the all important question, would this be useful to you?

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