Dick Tracy Watch Finally a Reality?

Dick Tracy is a long-running comic strip featuring a popular and familiar character in American pop culture. Dick Tracy is a hard-hitting, fast-shooting, and supremely intelligent police detective who has matched wits with a variety of often grotesquely ugly villains.

In January 1946, Gould changed Dick Tracy forever with the introduction of the 2-Way Wrist Radio after a visit to inventor Al Gross ... The 2-Way Wrist Radio was eventually upgraded to a 2-Way Wrist TV in 1964.

LG, a cellular Vendor from South Korea, has announced the creation of the multifunctional wrist watch. With this watch, it is as we are using a smart phone on our wrist. With facilities such as video phone, you will be as stylish as James Bond.

South Korea's LG Electronics ... unveiled what it described as the world's first watch-shaped mobile video phone.

The "3G watch phone" model has a touch-screen [dialing] system with a camera and a speaker built in to enable users to make video calls over a high speed internet connection, LG Electronic said in a statement.

It also [recognizes] voices, transforms text to speech, has a Bluetooth function and plays MP3 music.

The product has a 3.63-centimetre (1.43-inch) screen and is 13.9 millimetres (0.56 inches) thick. It will be on display at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas from January 8 to 11 [2009].

LG Electronics said it plans to launch the handset in European markets sometime next year.

The first thing to notice is the specs: unlike last time around, they're actually pretty solid. The GD910, as it's called, will support 3G, HSDPA, Bluetooth, text-to-speech and speech-to-text, and finally, videoconferencing via a front-mounted camera.

In the center of the watch face is a 1.4-inch touchscreen display that is used for most interaction. It is used as the keypad when making a call, for example. There are also buttons down the side of the phone's body.

The WCDMA (wideband code division multiple access) phone supports the latest 7.2Mbps (megabits per second) HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access) data system, so downloads should be fast. It can also make video calls via a small camera above the top right corner of the screen.

Other features include Bluetooth, an MP3 player, a speakerphone and a text-to-speech function. The handset is also waterproof.

... there are still a few problems that will be unavoidable in this form-factor, the largest of which LG has implicitly acknowledged with their product photos: unless you are a young child with young child fingers, don't plan on having an easy go of it.