Citizen has taken the futristic route with the ITX21-5014 watch from their Independent line. Behind the machine-like watch hands is a green LCD, turned 90 degrees to the left, that displays the digital date, time, alarms, chronographs and timers. The watch is finished off by a checkered band and engraving along the sidewalls of the watch. While not quite the controlled chaos that best describes the average Tokyoflash watch, it’s pretty cool and out there for Citizen, who typically make more boring timepieces. The ITX21-5014 is currently selling for ¥22,900 in Japan. [Tokyoflash via Geek Alerts]
There’s nothing to stop Japan’s infamous earthquakes, but there are better ways to get ready for them. Citizen is developing the Seismic watch to take advantage of the country’s “Earthquake Early Warning” radio service. It will pick up the radio signal as much as 10 seconds faster than the mobile text-message alternative. The way the watch alerts you of a coming earthquake does have a certain cinematic disaster-movie intensity to it. More »
Mitsubishi, Citizen, Sharp, Hitachi and Tanita are working together to create networked exercise equipment, which would track your progress across multiple machines and over time, giving you a detailed report of your time at the gym to go along with your anecdote about that dude who never wipes his sweat off the butterfly machine.
It's an interesting idea, and one that hardcore gym rats are sure to jump all over. It's also something that people with health conditions will probably use to give their doctors more info on just what happens to them when they're physically exerting themselves. Look for the project to pay off sometime next year, at least in Japan, with the results presumably making their way over to the US eventually. –Adam Frucci
Project Page (in Japanese) [via Digital World Tokyo]
