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In the olden days, the a tact watch was all the rage. These watches told the time by buzzing or chiming silently in your pocket, allowing you to tell the time without looking away from your paramour or the King. The complex little timepieces were quite delicate and the complication barely made it past the 17th century.
Now, however, a new watch, the Prompt, replicates the a tact concept with some high tech trappings.
From the site:
Prompt: The Anti-Watch is a timepiece with no numbers, hour, or second hands. There is no screen or connection to WiFi or Bluetooth. The orientation doesn’t matter and the time zone is irrelevant. Its minimal design can be worn on your wrist, kept in your pocket, or held comfortably in your hand. It won’t push you notifications, but will silently give the time to you when you tap on the face.
Timekeeping is pretty simple: you tap it to tell the quarter hour. That’s right – it will simply tell you if it’s closer to 2:30 than 2:15. Everything else is irrelevant.
The watch can also show you the current time with a set of LEDs around the edge of the watch.
“In more recent history, smart devices have taken over. Cell phones started inhabiting our pockets, then began migrating to our wrists in the form of smart watches. We are constantly connected and they are competing for our valuable attention. They tap our wrist with urgent phone calls or breaking news alerts, and congratulate us on our achieving our step goals. We are more distracted than ever,” write the creators. The Prompt aims to fix that.
The watch is $159 for super early birds on Kickstarter and will ship in August 2020. It’s a clever and austere way to tell time and it might just be a way to nip smartwatch distraction in the bud.
