i really want to like my SPOT watch

I have the Swatch Paparazzi, and I have been using it on and off for about 3 months. I really have tried to like this thing, but frankly it is just not very interesting. It feels like the SPOT/MSN Direct team took their inspiration from a bad vision of the information superhighway, circa 1995. The services offered (news, weather, stocks, movie schedules, horoscopes, Swatch City local events) are tiny toy versions of services I get on my phone and on the Net, so there's almost no incentive to look at them on the watch, except for the novelty factor or when I am truly, deeply bored. Since SPOT uses a broadcast model for distributing information, there's zero interactivity or social connectivity. And unless I've missed it, there's no way to make interesting personal content for the watch (graphics, tones etc). So let's see, that's three strikes, and here in California we know what that means. Guess we'll have to wait for version 3.0 on this SPOT thing...

Oh, but I do like the different animated watch faces. That part is fun, and I give credit to the Swatch folks for doing what they do well.

Here's an extended journal by Scott Weinman, a veterinarian who used a SPOT watch as part of an MBA class at Seattle University. He doesn't like it much, either.