Tick, tick... will mobiles slay wristwatches?

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: little while, I have a feeling the industry should be hedging their bets,” he said. “Long term rival devices are going to keep taking dollars away from the watch market.”

But Galie of Timex is optimistic, saying that watches regain popularity when consumers reach their 20s and 30s. He said that pattern has already happened in Europe and Asia and may become clear in the US soon. “There’s something about the watch as an item of jewellery, which brings people back to it, not just to tell time,” Galie said. Cole agreed that the cell phone timekeeping trend is not “a Rolex problem,” saying people don’t spend $5,000 on a watch to keep appointments. Galie said the watch industry is struggling to remake its identity. “Are watches relevant at all any more for their primary function ... telling time? The answer may be no,” he said. Traditional mechanical watches are regaining prominence after decades of dominance by battery-powered models, he said. At the other extreme, high-tech is popular, especially in sports watches that include global positioning technology and other features. A key strategy is to avoid competing head-to-head with cell phones, which have advantages such as bigger screens and keypads, he said.

Future watches may embrace high-speed wireless networks differently, delivering news alerts or collecting and transmitting sports performance data, Galie said.