Watch the Phone Watch!

Being a life-long fan of Night Rider, I've always wanted to look at one of those wristwatch phones that have been popping up on e-bay. Well, my wish came true recently when somebody my dad knows bought one and lent it to me to see if I could get it set up.

The little device is pretty impressive. It recognised my SIM card immediately. Choosing a victim from the numbers on my SIM I dialled them up, expecting a one way call I was pretty surprised to find that there's a tiny microphone in the device, meaning you can actually talk to people by shouting into your wrist, just like the Hoff did in Night Rider! Well, not quite, the sound from the speakers was so quiet that holding a conversation was extremely troublesome, being as I had to hold the phone to my ear to hear my contact. Still, it's a step closer to my Night Rider fantasies than the camp sounding robot voice that's supposed to be KITT on my sat-nav.

Aside from working as a fully functional phone, the little device also packs in a MP4 player, a FM radio, an MP3/Media player and even some simple games. The screen is a touch screen (though if you hated the keyboard on the iPhone, expect dialing on here without a stylus to be extremely awkward). I watched a sample video on the media player which seemed to be a clip from King Kong and mighty impressive it was too. The audio was much louder than making a call, though perhaps if I had to hold my wrist up to watch a whole movie I'd be wishing I spent my money on a portable media player instead.

The phone/watch is bulky but not too heavy and will rest on your wrist without pulling your arm off. The more fashion concious non-geeks might want to wear something long sleeved to cover it over, but bearing in mind I used to wear my Tetris wrist watch (http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2005/05/vintage_nintend.html) I don't think that's a problem for the out of the closet geek like myself.

Sadly, this particular phone/watch has a faulty USB connector, meaning there's no way to use the headphones or to transfer media to the device. That seems to be the main problem with this model of watch, the flimsy USB connector that it uses. You can see a picture of the connector here on the left, sandwiched between my knees. The connector HAS to be small, but regretably the way it attaches onto the watch is not very secure. The headphones attached the same way and would work sometimes if the cable was given a wiggle, a sure sign of an edge connector that is on its way out. Some kind of plastic clip to hold the cable in place and prevent up-down movement weakening the edge connector is what is really needed.

So sadly I was not able to set the device up. I'm told the gentlemen who owns this particular watch is a particularly big sports-playing type of person, so I hope he doesn't think I broke it :)