In computer news this week:

Lead: The internet on your wrist - a review of Timex Internet Messenger Watch after a year of use.

Last year Timex dropped their price on their Internet Messenger Watch and offered one free year of the paging service, which has increased its coverage area, so I bought one. I had read reviews of them on the internet and some of reviews were pretty negative, mentioning the size of the watch as very big, it used batteries fast, and that you would constantly receive meaningless pages from the Yahoo new service.

Previously I'd bought 3 of the Timex Ironman Datalink watches that talk to your computer and let you download outlooks contacts and phonebooks. They're also a sports watch with a lot of good features.

I bought an Internet Messenger Watch last November at Timex.com and have used it for almost a year now. Here's my observations of it.

First of all it's a great conversation piece and a good timepiece too and virtually the same size as my other Timex watches. It keeps time for 2 time zones, and it sets itself via a GPS satellite. If you travel to a different time zone - such as Montana - the satellite finds where you are and resets the time on your watch.

It has 5 alarms, a stopwatch with lap counter, and a countdown timer; all which work fine. So just as a watch, it's worth the price.

But I had all these features on my Timex Ironman watches - I bought this Internet Messenger Watch for it's internet mail and messaging capability.

The watch comes with one year of free internet mail and paging services from Skytel. You get an 800 number when you buy the watch, and when you register and set it up online at Skytel.com it's activated.

The pager functions means that anyone can call you on your 800 number - your watch will beep and it will show the phone number of the person who called you, so you can call them back.

The internet mail function means that you are assigned an email address of your 800 number at timex.com, which supposedly anyone can send email to you. However this has never worked for me.

What has worked is being able to go to the website skytel.com and sending email from there to my 800 number. You can send an email message of about 180 characters, which is enough the get the gist of the message across. Sometimes it's hard reading the message on the watch as it scrolls across the display in sections.

So I gave out my watch's 800 number to just a few people I wanted to be able to contact me anywhere I was, and it has worked ok.

One annoying thing is that you get a Yahoo news page once a day which you can't turn off, as yahoo is in some kind of partnership with Skytel. But that's the closest thing to spam I ever got on my watch.

Another problem is that I live in Spangle - about 10 miles South of Spokane and it appears to be a Skytel skip zone. I just don't get pages or email on my watch here. But it works fine in and around Spokane.

Another concern I had was the little hearing aid batteries it uses, which supposedly were used up fast. But I only changed batteries twice during this first year. I did have a problem with the watch not working at all once , despite putting in numerous new batteries - and Timex exchanged it promptly.

So now that my free year of paging services is about up, I'm faced with buying another year of paging services. The contract is $ 9.95 a month or $ 120 a year.

Or I could buy a brand new Timex Internet Messenger Watch for $ 50 and get another free year of paging services.

You do the math..

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 624-7230