I was excited to see the GlucoWatch 2 on sale in the US finally a few
weeks back.  So I went and accosted my doctor to sign the perscription,
faxed over my documents and ordered it at the fabulous new "low" price.
 My expectations were already pretty low since I know someone who had
the first version of the watch that didn't work very well and I've read
posts from the UK where folks have not been overly impressed.  But I
still had hopes that perhaps it would provide _some_ value in
monitoring trends at a minumum if not flat out accurate readings.

It doesn't.  It's pointless.

I've been using it for several days now and it's just completely and
utterly useless for anything whatsoever.  The readings are sporatic and
wildly inaccurate, like others I find it irritates my skin badly, it
often wont calibrate at all and 3 times it just fritzed out entirely
displaying garbage on the screen - no error codes no nothing.  The
watch had to be reset and a new back applied.  Several times it simply
would not accept the calibration entries - after entering 4 or 5 blood
readings in over the period of an hour or so I just gave up and put
another back on.  Very flakey...

To be clear, I've been wearing this in a nicely air conditioned office
during the day in all cases.  No persperation issues, no wild movements
(unless you consider typing to be possibly disruptive), no hair on the
arms, no nothing.  Ideal conditions for such a device.

It's not even good to let you know that you're trending up or down at
all - Today I took finger sticks every two hours and monitored it
against what the watch said (when it wasn't skipping for the mysterious
"data" error reason).  Starting at 6am my sticks gave me 121 in the
morning, I was down to 111 by 8am, 106 at 10, 98 at 12 and so on - it
was a pretty good day.  The watch reported I was at 141 by the time it
finally kicked in and started reading around 9am - then it went to 107,
back up to 131, then 144, then a bunch of skips, then 130, then 104,
then a bunch of skips followed by 124 etc... etc... it's all over the
boards.  Even recalibrating it again in the afternoon does nothing to
improve it's accuracy or consistency.  If it were off and at least
generally liniar, that'd be ok, but this is just completely useless.

And in case anyone was wondering - the "2" in GlucoWatch 2 does not
mean it's new - mine was manufactured in 2002.  Check your serial numbr
when you get it - it'll be at least 3 years old.  Pretty clear to me
they're dumping these defective devices on the market at a cut price to
make back as much money as they can before tanking completely.  I can
see why no one with a reputable name wanted to go in with these guys on
this device - it's clearly not ready for prime time.

Don't waste your money.  It sounds like a nice idea worth trying, it's
not.  If you just can't help yourself and must try it - you can buy
mine at a fraction of the price!  

-Jeff