After being at CES my wife said she wanted a SPOT watch, so I ordered her the Fossil Abacus AU4002 from Tiger Direct. Today it arrived and tonight while setting it up, we learned a few things about MSN Direct service which I’ll share below.

Lots of packing as you can see. They really don’t want this watch broken, which is a good thing of course.

The watch face is smaller than earlier models, so hopefully this won’t draw too many weird stares.

When you first unpack it the instructions say to put it on charge for 5-6 hours, which we did. It sits on a relatively heavy duty plastic cradle and you just need to line up the watch with the number of buttons on the watch.

While charging the watch I signed up at direct.msn.com. The first time I made a bonehead mistake and signed up under my .NET passport (don’t do this if you are activating the account as a gift for someone else or the watch will be assigned to you). So I called the friendly MSN Direct support desk at 866-658-7032 and they reset the account so I could go in under my wife’s .NET passport account and sign up again. During the sign-up process you can look at a map of the available coverage area which in my wife’s case was covered by “Greater Seattle Area” as shown below.

Lastly, my wife went to MSN Direct customize the channels. She was a bit disappointed that she couldn’t get her mutual fund update because MSN didn’t carry that symbol (why not?!), but she could get her horoscope sent and receive MSN messages which seemed to make her happy. Now she waits because it takes 12-24 hours to receive the initial welcome message and then she can begin to receive her updated content. I signed her up for the $59.95/year plan that comes with one free month.

Turning on the watch was a bit awkward (hold down the three buttons on the right and then release). Took a few times to make that work right.

All in all it’s a pretty nifty watch, but the fact that it doesn’t come with RSS feeds (so her favorite headlines could be streamed) and that the content and initial charge put it nearly a full day out of use brings the grade down a bit. Overall grade: B-

• Marketing at CES on the SPOT … watch
• Alexa Web Service wait continues
• Passport: predominantly Microsoft and partners
• SPOT watch spotty at best
• Is Earthlink trying to piss off longtime customers?
• eBay rejects Microsoft’s Passport