(FORTUNE Magazine) – According to historians of such things, the first wristwatch was worn more than four centuries ago by Queen Elizabeth I. By the late 19th century, elegant women wore wristwatches more for fashion than for punctuality. But only in World War I did men begin strapping them on; until the advent of mechanized warfare, wristwatches were considered effeminate.

There's nothing effeminate about the new Smart Watches from Microsoft and its partners. In fact, when the first Smart Watches reach stores later this month, you won't find any designed for women. That's because these watches contain radio receivers that make them big, clunky, and rich with geektosterone. When I showed a Smart Watch to my wife, she admired it with the same level of feigned-interest-mixed-with-pity she displays when I bring home, say, a wireless networking hub.

If you can accept the idea of wearing a bulky watch that requires a monthly subscription fee, frequent trips to the recharging dock, lots of button-pushing, and a nearby radio tower, you'll be mesmerized by the constant parade of infobits to your wrist. Based on Microsoft's new MSN Direct wireless service, Smart Watches pluck personalized streams of information from the air. Text messages from co-workers! Stock quotes and charts for my personal portfolio! Sports and news headlines! Appointment reminders from my Microsoft Outlook calendar! Local temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, wind chill, ultraviolet index, and wind speed and direction!

And yes, to answer my wife's first question, the watch even tells time. In fact, it automatically synchronizes with an atomic-clock signal, and even adjusts itself when I travel to a new time zone.

Unlike Dick Tracy's famous two-way wrist radio, MSN Direct--powered Smart Watches are strictly one-way affairs. They receive information that is customized by the user on Microsoft's MSN Direct website (www.msndirect.com) and broadcast over an FM sub-band in the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. and Canada. Subscribers pay a monthly fee of $9.95, or $59 for a one-year contract, on top of the price of the watch, which ranges from $100 to $300. Once the watch is activated on the MSN Direct site, the user can select from a variety of information channels. For example, I might want to receive technology, business, and sports news, but not international, health, or entertainment. There's even a watch-face channel, which broadcasts new designs for displaying the time and date. For formal occasions, I can choose a black face with Roman numerals; for casual days, I might choose a cartoon. Microsoft says the channel selection will expand to include local news and entertainment, scores and tidbits dedicated to your favorite team, and perhaps even wrist-top language lessons.

I've been testing two models, the $179 Fossil Wrist Net Round and the $299 Suunto N3. Several other models will hit stores this month, including a Dick Tracy Smart Watch from Fossil. (A Microsoft spokeswoman says pendant-style Smart Watches for women are on the drawing board, along with smaller wrist devices.) Off the cuff, Smart Watches get thumbs up for science and gizmosity. They're the first real-world example of Microsoft's long-awaited Smart Personal Object Technology, which has the potential to deliv-er custom-tailored infobits wirelessly to a wide variety of everyday devices ranging from watches to "smart" chopsticks. (This takes us a step closer to a science-fiction dystopian world in which any small object can display advertising.) On the other hand, there are annoyances. If you travel outside the MSN Direct coverage area, the Smart Watch becomes a Dumb Watch, a fat, ugly, expensive wrist bauble that tells great time but spews out yesterday's headlines, temperatures, and stock quotes like the worst boor at the cocktail party. Fortunately, you can erase all the overripe news by pressing and holding a button. As soon as you return to an area where MSN Direct is broadcast, the watch gets Smart again.

Smart Watches also get a slap on the wrist for poor battery life. Because the radio receiver is always on, the watches I tested required a trip to the recharging station every two or three days. The Fossil recharging system is actually quite cool, in a geeky sort of way. It uses an inductive system: Just hang the watch on its cleverly designed desktop recharging stand and it absorbs all the electromagnetic energy it needs. The Suunto watch comes with an AC-powered recharging line that looks like a miniature version of your car's jumper cables.

My immediate concern was the security of information. Could someone hack into my Smart Watch, tuning in to my private FM frequency to snatch my data streams, including MSN Messenger instant messages from the office? Or, conversely, to spam me with Viagra ads and Nigerian oil-scam letters while I walk down the street? Microsoft insists that the Smart Watches have unique identifiers and filter out all data not specifically requested by the owner; it also says all transmissions are encrypted.

At one point my Fossil Smart Watch suddenly went stupid. Although the backlight button worked, the rest of the watch face was dark. A call to Microsoft technical support revealed the cause: a burst of static electricity when I pushed the watch through my coat sleeve. The solution: rebooting the watch by pushing three buttons at once, the wrist-top equivalent of hitting CONTROL-ALT-DELETE on a Windows PC. I guess it wouldn't be a Microsoft watch without the familiar three-finger salute.

For more tech advice, see Peter Lewis's weblog at www.fortune.com/ontech.