Trying out the projector
I know you want to see the projector first, so I’ll just jump right in. The 640×480 projector can focus with a projected image as small as just a few inches or it can project an image up to about the size of a 42 inch TV. The projection is bright, but still hard to see with the lights on, of course. Turning the projector on (as you can see in the video below) requires just hodling down one of the little buttons on the left or right of the face of the phone. One is for internal projection while the other projects from an external video source. The external video source is handled by a small included cable for RCA in. In my testing, I simply plugged by XBox into this cable and the cable into the phone to hook it up. Then I hit the external source projection button, chose between PAL and NTSC and was projecting video. I live this feature because you can easily hook it up to any device with RCA out cables, like a personal media player, for larger viewing. Imagine you’re at a party and a friend wants to show everyone a funny video but it’s on his small PMP. Just hook it up to your phone and everyone can watch… after they’re done reeling at the fact that your phone has a projector in it.
The alternative to an external video source is internal memory. When you press and hold that projection key, it just displays what the phone’s internal display would otherwise show. That’s good and bad, really. It’s good because you’re not limited to just projecting stored video files. I don’t see much of a reason to project anything else, but at least you have the option. It’s bad because in this mode, the video projects in the same orientation as the phone’s internal display. This means you have to turn the phone on it’s side to view the video upright and the phone’s design is such that it doesn’t sit flat on its side. It comes close, but doesn’t quite do it. The other problem with this is that you have to see the whole video player interface when you play an internal video file. It would be far better if they changed it to swap the orientation to landscape when a video file is played and fill the whole viewable area with the actual video.
To focus the video, there’s a little glider switch on the bottom of the phone. I thought this would have been better placed on a side and should have been a wheel just because it would make the task of focusing the picture that much easier. In my tests and playing, I found that I would focus past the point of a crisp picture in either direction a few times before landing on the crisp picture.
Other features While you probably came to drool over the video projection functionality of this phone, I think I should still point out everything else it has to offer. First of all, like many of Chinavasion’s phones, it’s a touch screen and comes with a stylus. Along with the touch screen, it has a normal phone key pad as well as left and right side navigation buttons, the internal and external projection buttons, the call and end/power buttons, a home button, and surrounding the home button is a 4 way navigational rocker button. That’s all just on the face of the phone. The left side includes the standard volume rocker buttons and the right has two input connections. I scratched my head a bit about the multiple inputs, but there’s certainly technical reasons for doing that. My guess is that it has a lot to do with the many things you can plug into this phone.
The user interface for this phone is strikingly familiar. It looks an works a lot like the iPhone. Actually, the interface looks almost exactly like the iPhone, from the layout right down to many of the icons. It doesn’t work as smoothly as the iPhone, but not much does, and really, they managed to pull over a couple of the nicer things into this phone. For example, unlocking or turning off the device with a swipe of the finger is still my favorite method.
You’ll find many of the standard applications, such as the web browser, calculator, note pad, camera, video, music player, etc. bundled into the phone’s software as well. One thing I’ve noticed with Chinavasion is that they tend to load their devices up with a lot of features and programs, which is a good thing.
What else comes with it?
Everything came is a white, plain box. This box included the phone, a user’s manual, a wall charger, a data cable/USB charger, a hands-free headset that also works as regular stero headphones, two batteries, and a wall battery-only charger for the extra battery. Again, Chinavasion likes to make sure you’re covered, so they throw in everything they can think of. I can almost never get everything back in the box with their products.
Video and conclusions
These days, a phone is a phone is a phone. What I mean is that for making calls, the hardware doesn’t vary much. It’s the design and everything else that the manufacturer packs into the phone that makes it the device you must have. In this case, Chinavasion has done a good job adding in all the stuff you’d expect from a phone plus a little more. Then they threw on this projector, a feature that has been talked about before but one that I (and most of the planet) have never seen implemented in a consumer-released cell phone until now. The projector has a few areas for improvement, I think, but over all, they did a great job with the device. While it’s a little heavy, I must remind myself that the extra weight is worth the additional “wow” factor. This is another great phone for the money.
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.
Just before the Christmas, Chiinavasion, an electronics wholesaler, sent me a unique little video camera to review. It’s their MPEG4 digital video camcorder with “telescope style 8x optical zoom lens”, and it turned out to be more than I anticipated at first glance.
The box everything came in was nondescript, small, and was packed with everything needed to get started. Included was the camera, the 8x optical zoom lens with a lens cap, a US plug converter, an AC power cable, battery, USB cable, TV out cable, remote control, headphones, software, manual (in Chinese and English) and a carrying case. The camera includes a built in microphone and speaker, a 3 inch TFT LCD screen that folds out to view and can be flipped 180 degrees for self-protraits, a 5 Megapixel CMOS image censor and a 12 Megapixel max resolution (interpolated).
The big marketing draw for this camera is, of course, the 8x optical zoom lens, so I started playing with that right away. I quickly reminded myself how useless that level of zoom is in my house, so I headed to the top of a building. The camera’s built-in lens is threaded, allowing the zoom lens to simply screwed in. Once attached, the lens focus is adjusted to get a clear picture. In the video below, I pointed the camera at a nearby neighborhood, attached the zoom lens, and pointed it back at the neighborhood, revealing a lot more detail than before. I tried to edit the video, but Windows Movie Maker hates me today. You can also take a look at the unaltered video file right here (22MB). This camera also has built-in 4x digital zoom controls on the back. Unlike the attachable zoom lens, which is 8x or nothing, the digital zoom is adjustable, but I generally dislike using digital zoom as it tends to pixelate the image.
The camera does more than just video. When you turn it on, you can switch it from “Video Camera” mode to “Camera” mode for some pretty decent still images. I took a few to show the color and clarity with and without the optical zoom lens attached, but I also wanted to know how this camera measures up against my Sony DSC-P41 point-and-shoot camera and my new Canon Rebel XTi DSLR camera. None of the pictures below will win any awards, but they offer an interesting comparison. The LED flash from the Chinavasion camera puts out a pretty bright, whiter, light, leaving me with a whiter photo.
Sony DSC-P41
Chinavasion
Canon DSLR
One thing I found unique with this camera is the included remote control. With it, I can take a group photo and be in it without trying to sync up to a timer. Better still, I can take 4 or five in a row without moving, just to make sure I get it right.
Beyond video and still image capturing, this camera includes four additional functions. You can play back videos and images, record just audio, and play MP3 audio files, essentially making it a full personal media player as well as a video and still camera. The MP3 player doesn’t offer any special features beyond choosing a track and playing it back, but it IS a video camera, so just playing the MP3s seems like it should be enough. The audio recording is simple enough, as well. You enter the “Record” mode and hit the shutter release button to begin recording. Then hit it again to stop. Since the audio files are stored in the same folder as still images and video, you have to head to “JPEG” mode to review what you’ve recorded.
A final mode is “Setup”, which allows a lot more custom settings than many cameras. In the Setup mode, you can change the flicker frequency, beep alerts, time, media selection, language, power settings, TV mode (NTSC/PAL), logo display, brightness and format the storage. Additionally, you can hit the menu button to reveal even more settings for resolution, frame rate, audio and white balance when dealing with video capture. The still image capture menu allows you to modify capture mode (with timer option), date stamp, flash mode, scenery, EV (for a darker or lighter image), quality, resolution, white balance, color (normal/sepia/B&W), and quick preview. In JPEG mode, you can rotate, lock or delete images from the menu, and the menu button changes the playback mode for MP3s.
The camera itself has a good weight to it but it’s still comfortable enough to carry around. Because of the weight, I’d hate to drop it as I’m guessing the plastic casing would crack if dropped from standing eye level. Although the zoom lens comes with one cap, I’d love to have one for each side, or maybe just an extra space in the carrying case for the zoom lens to keep it protected. After two weeks, I still haven’t tried every feature and function, but I’ve seen enough to consider it a pretty good deal for the price (about $110 wholesale from the site).
While you probably came to drool over the video projection functionality of this phone, I think I should still point out everything else it has to offer. First of all, like many of Chinavasion’s phones, it’s a touch screen and comes with a stylus. Along with the touch screen, it has a normal phone key pad as well as left and right side navigation buttons, the internal and external projection buttons, the call and end/power buttons, a home button, and surrounding the home button is a 4 way navigational rocker button. That’s all just on the face of the phone. The left side includes the standard volume rocker buttons and the right has two input connections. I scratched my head a bit about the multiple inputs, but there’s certainly technical reasons for doing that. My guess is that it has a lot to do with the many things you can plug into this phone.
