I never really watched Dick Tracy, but the geek in me has always liked cool technologies crammed into watches. I had one of those calculator watches that stored phone numbers and I wanted a TV watch when they came out, so imagine my excitement when this mobile phone wrist watch from Chinavasion arrived in my mail box. If the company name sounds familiar, you may be remembering the review I posted last month of their MPEG4 digital video camcorder with optical telescope zoom lens. A couple of my co-workers laughed at my uber-geek status symbol, while the others watched and asked about the features as I unboxed it. No matter what the response, it certainly draws attention.

In the box
The box opened up in layers. On the first layer is the watch, itself, and the bluetooth headset. The bottom half contained a power adapter, international converter, user manuals for the phone and the headset, a battery charger, two batteries, a cable to charge the bluetooth headset via USB and a USB data cable for the phone. Chinavasion tends to pack a small box with a lot of stuff as I found out from my last review, so this wasn’t much of a surprise. The batteries had some juice in them, so I was able to rob my iPhone of its SIM card and dive right in.

About the device
As one might expect, the phone is shaped just like a watch, but has some anticipated differences, the most noticeable of which is the size. It’s not the behemoth that I feared when I thought of a watch that could make phone calls, play games, record and play audio and video, take pictures, and surf the web, but it’s definitely larger than my other watches. The rubber straps are also different from most watches in that they are formed to the shape of a wrist, rather than relaxed to loosely wrap around the wearer. This is likely to keep them out of the camera view, which works nicely for a barely noticeable loss in comfort, though I think I’d personally like the option to buy it with more relaxed leather straps. The face of the watch contains a fairly large (for a watch) touch screen and an attractive gun metal finish and four speakers, one in each corner. The bottom of the watch face contains a very small microphone and the top contains the camera lens. The Up, Down, and Back/Power buttons are on the right side, while the left contains the camera and OK/Option buttons as well as the USB connection port. The underside hides the battery which covers the included 1GB microSD card and the SIM card. Also tucked underneath and against the wearer’s wrist is a tiny stylus.

The speakers offered good sound quality and were nice and loud during normal use, but were very quiet during my test calls. Making a phone call via the bluetooth, on the other hand, proved much more rewarding, which is good, because most people will make their calls with the headset, anyway. The stylus is also a bit difficult to get out. A stylus should never slip out too easily, but this one was required a bit more effort than I think it should have. Time may loosen it up a bit. The size is obvious enough that it provoked questions about the watch from my brother and friends, but the over all aesthetic design makes up for that, as well as the tons of features.

Making Calls
My rule for any phone is that before it can be anything else, it should be a good phone. As a speaker phone, it let me down somewhat with volume low enough that I had to hold it up to my head to hear the person I called. Admittedly, the speakerphone would be hardly used by me, but now and then, I’d like to just lay the watch down on the desk and talk without the bluetooth.

Calls can be made in a couple ways. The fastest way to make a call is to tap the little blue call button on the home screen with a fingernail or the stylus. The dialing screen appears with numbers to press to make your call. The other way I made phone calls was to choose a number from my phone book. This required first entering the number and name into my phone book by tapping very tiny on screen keys with the stylus. When calibrated, I mostly hit the right keys, but it was still a little frustrating having to delete and try again several times. Future models might include a larger scrolling keyboard or keys that enlarge when touched like the iPhone has. Included is a searchable phone book with the ability to give each entry its own user picture and ring tone as well as add them to calling groups.

Shoot some video and stills on the go

Having a watch I could make phone calls with was cool, but before I ever wanted that, I longed for a camera watch. I’ve always been fascinated with still and video cameras that were out of the ordinary, so I went straight to the video recording feature next. Like most everything on the phone, the video camera comes complete with settings for banding, night shot, lighting and EV. The one setting I didn’t see was the ability to increase the video size. At 128×104 and 3 frames per second, the quality is about par with some cheaper cell phones and the size is much smaller than I had anticipated. It’s handy to have a video camera ready to go on your wrist, but the viewing experience leaves something to be desired. An example video taken one night from my couch can be viewed at right. Videos can be played back from the integrated player to preview your work.

The camera functionality lived up to my expectations for this device and the included software exceeded them. The camera takes pictures at 640×480 and has a lot of settings. A photo that I took at a pub Michelle and I biked to for lunch is shown below. You can choose from 3 different shutter sounds or use no shutter sound for discreet photos. The EV can be set from -4 to +4 and you can choose between 50Hz or 60Hz banding or use a delay timer of 5, 10, or 15 seconds. It can even be set to continuous shot mode, where you hold down the shutter button to take 3 or 5 pictures in a row. You can adjust the image size and quality, as well, but with a 1GB card, I would just leave it at the highest size and quality all the time. The camera can be set to your choice of lighting settings for indoor or outdoor shooting or even night shot and your standard Sepia, B/W, and inverted color options exist, too. To make things interesting, you could add a frame to photos while taking them, but a photo editor is built in with more frames, icons, text overlay, image flipping, etc. for really playing around.

TXT, MMS, and Web
While text messages were pretty standard, I was unable to send or receive an MMS or browse the web with my AT&T SIM card at the time of this writing.

Everything else
Chinavasion, I’ve found, doesn’t like to leave much out in terms of software. This particular device includes a puzzle game, different colored interface themes, background image choices, and a stop watch with normal, split, and lap modes and the ability to save. It also provides an audio recorder with playback, file manager, and user profiles that can be customized, not to mention various other phone and device settings. Let’s not forget the full featured organizer with a calendar, alarms, unit and currency converters, a world clock (with a clickable map), and health management programs. It looks like everything they could think of has been added and then some, leaving me with the impression that Chinavasion wants to make sure this phone is on a level playing field with today’s smart phones.

Conclusions
The bluetooth clarity of the phone calls was great and it comes loaded with an extra battery, headset, and everything you need to get the most out of it. Text entry was often time-consuming and frustrating with a large margin for error and the video capture is too small to be all that useful. For the price (a little over $100), this is a very affordable way to fulfill your Dick Tracy spy on the go fantasy while keeping touch with your real life friends and family and never leaving home without a camera. It won’t replace my iPhone, but would have made an easy replacement for some of my past cell phones for sure.

Related posts:

1. Be a Dick with a Cell Phone
2. It’s a PDA, It’s a Watch, It’s a PMP, It’s a Phone. It’s All of the Above
3. Chinavasion Projector Cell Phone – Let the Drooling Begin
4. I’m Watch : A Smart Phone For Your Wrist
5. All Your Cell Phones Conencted With The XLink Bluetooth Cellular Gateway