With more and more teens and young adults not owning a watch and using cell phones to tell time, will wristwatches soon become obsolete? I had a friend tell me yesterday that a watch is "an extra piece of equipment with no necessary function that’s soon to lose all meaning”.

Really, if you stop and think about it, today, when every 2-year-old owns a cell phone before he's even learned to speak, why would you walk around a witha stupid wrist band (Armstrong just had a heart-attack)  to tell time? Sharing that opinion, the watch industry is at a crossroads.

"It's definitely true that we're seeing a decline in the number of watches sold to younger people," said senior vice president for technology at Timex Corp., the top U.S. watch maker. He also admitted fewer young people wear watches today than five years ago. “The biggest sales declines are with low-end models, especially sub-$10 watches that represent 15 percent to 20 percent of the market's total value”, he said. 

The interesting part about this is that 2008 was a record year in terms of revenue, thanks to the sale of high-end watches. “The watch industry still does very well at making money, with 2007 its best year ever, sales are steady for mid-priced watches costing up to $150 and are improving above that, with substantial growth for watches costing $1,000 and up”, said the vice president.

What can we gather from that? That people might be wearing watches to impress, even if they are using their cell-phones to tell time. Maybe that’s why where seeing more and more talk about watches as an item of jewelry?

So… it IS true! the cell-phones already pushed the watch out in the time telling buisness, And without what the watch’s original intent always has been, we’re now just wearing watches as fancy bracelets with a gadget.   

Well, as long as the babes are more impressed by a Rolex than an i-Phone, I guess we don’t have anything to worry about.