Mobile Phone Watch Review

September 21, 2009

Yesterday (well, today in North America) around noon, my birthday present to myself arrived. Direct from China, a mobile phone watch!

I had reserved expectations, considering it was fairly cheap, but I must say I’ve been very impressed by the capabilities so far.

It comes with a wireless Bluetooth headphone clip, capable of playing stereo music and two-way conversations. It’s even smart enough to pause your music when there’s an incoming call, then resume it when you hang up.

Now, I did come across a bit of a glitch with the Bluetooth (USB and Bluetooth are so ubiquitous, and so flakey). It seems that when the AVCTP protocol (which lets you control the music player via the control stick on the clip) is active, the sound gets choppy and distorted. However, if you disable that (which isn’t really needed), everything seems to work smoothly.

The interface is a touchscreen that can be controlled:

  1. Using your fingernail – surprisingly, you can do about 90% of what you need this way.
  2. Using the side buttons to scroll, select, cancel etc.
  3. Using the tiny little pen stylus, tucked in the armband. This is best for entering text, as the onscreen keyboard is super-tiny.
It has a camera that takes still photos and videos. Quality is comparable to an average low cost phone. It also plays video files in MP4 and 3GP format. I found a program called VIO that will take any video and convert it to a suitable file.

This is to be my primary cell phone while I’m here, so I’ll follow up down the line with a long term review covering reception and battery life.

So far it seems to be a fun little toy :)