As silly as it gets.

Have you ever seen a wearer trying to use one of those dated Casio Calculator watches, miniscule keyboard and all, strapped to his wrist? I have and I can assure you I could do the math faster and almost certainly more accurately than the user of this party conversation starter. Or stopper. That is if your idea of a fun party is one where soup-stained beards and pocket protectors dominate the sartorial equation.

The Casio could give you calculator power in addition to the date and time. Now we are hearing rumors that the B players who now run Apple are thinking of coming up with a smartwatch. Quite what it will do I’m not sure but the very limited screen space will likely present a filtered subset of data available to other devices, be they cell phones, tablets or computers. Maybe the weather, a stock quote or two, airline flights and so on. It’s no great fun looking at the small display of an iPhone for long, so now make that display one tenth the size and what do you have? A solution looking for a problem and a trip to the eye specialist.

Maybe, James Bond style, there will be a small camera built in, allowing you to take truly ghastly images for some purpose or other but except for the Grade school set – where a gadget’s life span is measured in weeks until the next one comes along – I simply do not see a smartwatch as a device with sustained selling or staying power. In other words, I’m not about to sell my mechanical wrist watch. It does only one thing, tell the time, and not very accurately at that, but it sure as heck is lot more pleasure to look at than a smartwatch. And I can make it out with ease.

Were I running Apple, I would be pretty concerned about Google’s nascent Glass(es). Innovative, unexpected, maybe groundbreaking. I would also be looking to my brains’ trust asking where our competitive device was.

Sergey Brin of Google models Glass.