When I was in second grade, one of my classmates showed up for school with a watch that had a calculator on it. The rest of us sat through homeroom, practically twitching with excitement, and stealing sidelong glances at his wrist, casually resting on the desktop. Finally, it was recess – we gathered round as he added, subtracted, multiplied, divided, and generally enjoyed a moment at the top of the social pyramid as we stared jealously at his hightech toy.

I have no doubt that when my classmate grew up, he ordered the first Casio camera watch when it came out in 2001. Sure, it’s a second-rate camera, less than 1 megapixel, and the pictures aren’t even as good as most camera phones these days. But it stores more than 100 shots, transfers the data to other Casio watches or to your computer via a standard infrared port, and it’s the most instantly available camera imaginable (until someone invents an eyeglass camera). As one piece of equipment doing the work of two, it’s perfect for the light-traveling voyager, and at $179 it’s a lot cheaper than a camera phone. Plus, you can take it into Saudi Arabia, where, according to their embassy, custom officials not only confiscate camera phones, they don’t give them back when you leave.

The amount of stuff packed into watches these days is staggering. Impressed with those USB drives on key chains? Now you can get one on a Timex. Timex’s Ironman Datalink comes in 128-, 256-, and 512-megabyte versions ($80 to $190), plus a short USB cable for quick connection to a computer. Business travelers can use it for portable PowerPoint presentations, while casual voyagers might just be happy to have a convenient place to backup pictures. There are other USB watches out there from Xonix and Edge Digital Media, but Timex’s also syncs up with Microsoft Outlook, which means you can keep addresses and phone numbers in there, too. It’s also a sports watch – it does stopwatch, splits, has a backlight, and keeps time for three time zones at once.

Hammacher Schlemmer produces, of all things, a color-TV watch for $199. The display screen is small, at 1.5 inches, but accord ing to reviews in various trade magazines, the image is shockingly crisp – good enough even for the last few seconds of a Giants football game. Picture quality depends heavily on reception, however. Big cities introduce a lot of static, but pick-up in open areas is supposed to be pretty good.

Hikers and outdoors-people may not need a PDA or TV on their wrist.The point of getting away from it all is to get away, after all. But such travelers may be interested in the Suunto Observer. For $300, this watch comes with an altimeter, barometer, thermometer, compass, and logbooks to track trends in any of this data. Oh, and it tells time.

For the truly nerdy traveler – and I confess, that’s me – nothing can beat Fossil’s WristNet ($179), which connects to the Internet. It doesn’t provide full access for Web surfing and e-mail, and it depends on Microsoft for its service ($9.99 a month), but it feeds sports scores, news items, and weather reports across its little 2-inch screen, and there are plans to add more data. Unfortunately, with its rubber wristband and digital display, the Wrist-Net isn’t all that attractive. Actually, it kind of reminds me of that old calculator watch.