They also made some SPOT watches back then (Microsoft tech that pushed things like weather/news/emails/stocks/etc. to watches over FM radio).

I had one of the PalmOS watches. Very cool but battery life and inputting text were horrendous. I imagine Palm got most of the patents around that but maybe Fossil got some too.

Yes, I had a Fossil Abacus WristPDA (PalmOS 4.0) also at one point. I agree with both your criticisms, especially battery life; that thing drank juice from the battery like an eight-armed alcoholic, and you had to use its special USB cable with added power supply to recharge it nightly.

Jamie Zawinski once suggested that I turn PalmOS DaliClock into a "watch face" app, but, once I researched how those worked, I realized it would kill the battery even faster, and wouldn't even work right as watch face apps only got periodic CPU, about once a minute to update their display.