With key leaders from Fossil taking over the Meta Watch assets, the project’s focus won’t change. Meta Watch will still be a Bluetooth-enabled wristwatch that wirelessly connects to a smartphone for alerts, notifications, messaging and more. The company will continue to sell a development platform for $200, with expected availability this month. The goal remains to make Meta Watch a platform for developers; not to create end-user consumer products.

In advance of the news, I spoke last week with Geiser, who takes on the CEO role of Meta Watch, and asked why Fossil was willing to let Meta Watch go. “It’s a win, win, win,” Geiser told me by phone, saying, “It’s good for Fossil, good for us and good for this category. But the connected watch business wasn’t in scope of Fossil’s core competency of lifestyle products. So this generated an opportunity for a focused team to take this on because when you throw radios in these products, it changes everything.”

I agree with Geiser’s thoughts, in particular the last one because I’ve used several “smart” watches over the past half-dozen years. Simply put: Few have worked well for me outside of the Meta Watch prototype I reviewed this past June. The Meta Watch manages the wireless connection extremely well, runs for a long time on a single charge and smartly provides useful information at a glance, instead of trying to do too much on a small screen.

You can read my full review and impressions of the gadget here, but this summary of my thoughts explains the vision that the Meta Watch provided me:

[T]he MetaWatch team “gets it” when it comes to smart watches. There are many visions of what a smart watch ought to do, but the more functionality added, the more complex and disruptive the technology can be. Perhaps one day we’ll all be talking into our wrist for a phone call, but for the coming future, a display-at-a-glance device with a simple, intuitive interface is saving me much time.

In my use of a Meta Watch prototype, the device hasn’t yet missed a notification from my Android smartphone. “We think of ourselves of the FedEx of notifications,” Geiser says. As a result, I found myself relying on the watch to triage my email because notifications are instantly pushed from smartphone to watch. With just an unobtrusive glance at my wrist, it’s a simple matter to see if an email is urgent enough to pull out the smartphone, or if the message can wait until later, for example.

Geiser told me the Meta Watch team will continue to look at other smartphone platforms and also move beyond standard notifications for incoming calls, SMS, email and other alerts. Music control, location-based check-in — perhaps even advertising based on location — navigation and sports activities are all potential areas for the platform. And developers looking to instrument their own apps can easily do so.

We’ll be talking about “smart” watches and other non-traditional connected devices later this month at our Mobilize conference in San Francisco, and I’ll be curious to see where the conversation leads. In particular, we’re not yet at the point for wearable computers to take the place of smartphones in our pocket.

We’re limited by display size and input methods, just to name a few constraints. But for now, an ambient notification system on the wrist can provide far more value than people realize. It’s now up to the Meta Watch team to preach that message to consumers and attract developers to broaden the possibilities for this useful prototype watch.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Mobile first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

Meta Watch will be available in either an analog or a digital option, both of which have OLED informational displays. Both are packed with smartphone-like sensors and motors as well; inside the water-resistant stainless steel case is a vibrating motor, a three-axis accelerometer and an ambient light sensor. Like any platform, developers will have to create intelligent applications to tie the watch to a smartphone. Since the Meta Watch will be shown off in the Google I/O Developer Sandbox next week, it’s likely that Android handsets will be among the first to benefit.

This isn’t the first time that Fossil has dabbled with intelligent watches. Back in 2004, I purchased a SPOT watch built by Fossil that used FM radio to get information through Microsoft’s MSNDirect service to my wrist. The SPOT watches have since been discontinued and Microsoft is deactivating the service as more effective devices and data delivery methods have appeared in the form of smartphones and mobile broadband networks. I stopped wearing a watch as I transitioned from my SPOT watch to a handset, but I’m still intrigued by the idea of the Meta Watch and other similar devices.

The concept of these devices has merit, at least to me and likely anyone else that carries a smartphone in their pocket. Instead of simply telling time, a smart watch can act as a secondary display for another device like handset or tablet. Using low-powered wireless technology such as Bluetooth, these watches can show text messages, caller ID information, important emails and calendar event reminders. More advanced functionality that allows true interaction — say replying to a text message through voice recognition — isn’t out the realm of future opportunities. And there’s no need to pull out the smartphone for this type of interaction.

So far, however, the current crop of these smarter watches have been troubled with wireless connectivity issues, based on the many reviews I’ve read. I was about to pull the trigger on either Sony’s Live View (shown) or an InPulse watch for use with my Android phone, but many owners complain that the Bluetooth connection exhibits dropped connections.

Hopefully, the Bluetooth solution from TI eliminates that problem, so I can just glance at my wrist instead of firing up the smartphone just to check emails and Facebook updates. Maybe I feel this way just because I’m reading Ray Kurzweil’s book “The Singularity Is Near,“ but I’m ready for wearable computing devices.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

I bought the Fossil field bag a year ago, and while it is as small as can be (and manly) it can handle a 10-inch netbook with ease. The three pockets are perfect for any size accessories, and help keep things organized. The leather straps with the magnetic buckles are easy to secure and open, and contribute to how manly the Fossil bag appears.

This is the bag I grab for quick day outings, and it has served me well. The only downside to using the Fossil Nevada field bag is the constant interruptions I get in the wild from people stopping me to tell me how manly it looks. Yes they do.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d): To Win In the Mobile Market, Focus On Consumers