Were there any smartwatches in 2000?
In june 2000, ibm displayed a prototype for the watchpad, a wristwatch that ran linux. The original version had only 6 hours of battery life, which was later extended to 12. It featured 8 mb of memory and ran linux 2. The device was later upgraded with an accelerometer, vibrating mechanism, and fingerprint sensor. Steve mann, an inventor from canada, arguably designed the first smartwatch in 1998, though there were other sophisticated watches and wrist computers which came out before this time, as early as 1983-4 in the case of seiko. Mann’s device debuted in 2000 and ran the linux operating system.