Turning your wrist into a Palm. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. The folks at Fossil have tried to merge a PDA into a wristwatch before. The results were big bulky watches that could carry data from Palm or PocketPC devices... .but didn't let owners enter new contacts or appointments on the fly. So the company went back to the drawing board... .and what VP of Technology Donald Brewer has come up with is a full fledged Palm OS device... built into a slimmed down watch...

"It features touch screen input, so the user actually has a stylus integrated into the watchband itself that they can pull out and use when they need to enter their own data. It comes with 2 megs of internal memory, the same as you'd find on many of the standard Palms today. And most importantly, when it's not in Palm mode doing any one of the things... various PIM applications or personal information manager applications you would want, it is a watch.

While the new device won't be available for purchase until the spring of next year... .one of the obvious drawbacks is the one inch square screen size... .not exactly optimal for viewing your calendar or addressbook. But Brewer contends...

"The pixel resolution is so crisp that in most cases we can run regular Palm applications ... such as the calculator app or an application like Vindigo and users find it extremely usable."

Place the watch into a cradle to sync with a PC and recharge its battery. Pricing will start... at about two hundred dollars. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.