For those of you who can’t bear to be away from their MSN Messenger service for more than a few minutes, Citizen have teamed up with Microsoft to produce this cool looking watch, apparently with support for MSN Direct.

The Abacus watch comes in a stainless steel shell, and features a 120 x 60 pixel LCD display. The mechanism, casing and strap were designed by Citizen, and the software was developed by Microsoft.

At $180 it’s not too expensive, and that includes a free one year subscription to MSN Direct, which would normally be $40 a year. As well as individual messages, the watch can receive business and sports news, stock market reports, weather reports etc via FM radio. There’s also of course support for automatic updates via the Atomic Clock. Receiving Outlook emails and MSN Messenger texts are extra though, but there’s no price given at this time.

One thing that does concern me is that apparent battery life, which seems to be 7 days for continual use. That seems quite short to me, though I’m not sure what “continual use” means in practice. There must be easier ways of staying connected to MSN Messenger though!

The Abacus Smart Watch 2006 Japanese version  English version (via Google translate).

Found via Digital World Tokyo.