Chinese ‘S9110’ aka ‘Fashion’ Watch Phone Review

After my positive experiences with the Nova N800 GSM watch phone that I bought back in 2008, I have been regularly keeping an eye on any new models of such gadgets coming out. The most interesting thing that has happened since, was two major companies bringing out their own watch phones. However, their offerings, the LG ‘GD910’ and the Samsung ‘S9110’ were priced way too high to my taste. So I kept looking for the more reasonably priced Chinese offerings. After a few dozen new ugly and unpractical contraptions, one particular model caught my eye and I couldn't resist trying it out.

Murphy's Law

I have never had any problems with gadgets ordered from Hong Kong or China, until now. About everything that could go wrong went wrong with this shipment, with as result that two months and one week passed between me ordering the phone and actually obtaining it, and also that I paid 50% extra in taxes and fines, because the declared value was lower than the actual value. Luckily the string of misfortunes ended when I finally opened the package and the gadget proved to be in perfect working order, and also better than I expected.

When ordering rather expensive gadgets like this, you may want to ask the seller to ship it through DHL instead of regular mail, not only to speed things up but also because there's generally a lower risk of customs intercepting the package. The extra cost for DHL shipment is far less than the taxes you risk having to pay. I ordered the watch phone for about GBP 120 from a Hong Kong seller on eBay, called ‘to-be-best’. He was very helpful with tracking down the package during the whole customs ordeal, and unfortunately I haven't been able to give him the positive feedback he deserves due to the enormous delay. So instead, I'll recommend him here. Many people buy stuff from Hong Kong sellers and immediately give up and leave often unjustified negative feedback whenever something goes wrong. Many of these sellers take pride in providing good service and will be very willing to help you if you contact them.

What's In the Box

Now, what model is this watch phone and what does it look like? Well, it is not only visually similar to Samsung's S9110, it is even sold under the same model number in many cases. If you are somewhat familiar with purely Chinese products, you should know that they have a bit of a weird commercial culture, and brand names don't really mean much there. This phone is branded with the name ‘Fashion’, but just as with ‘Nova’, I suspect there is no such thing as a Chinese company called ‘Fashion’. I have even seen variations of this phone that bore a “SVMSUNG” logo, in an obvious attempt to let it pass as a real Samsung S9110. Good thing that the one I ordered did not have this, otherwise the customs would probably have confiscated it and charged for importing counterfeit products, for which the fine is a lot higher than for incorrect declaration of value.

The phone comes in a pretty nice but also quite large and heavy box, which probably was one of the things that made it conspicuous to the customs guys. Inside the box, next to the phone itself, are:

• A spare battery
• A wall charger (which offers a USB power socket). I specifically asked for a European model and got one too.
• A wired headset
• A Bluetooth headset
• A manual.

The differences with the Nova are that this phone did not come with a microSD card (I had to provide my own, but some sellers may ship it with a card) and that the manual for this one is in pure unadulterated Engrish. According to the manual, “This cellular phone is person the machine engineering learn principle of science design with consummate craft of perfect crystallize, streamlined choiceness fuselage, hold feeling comfort.”

Features

The first thing I noticed when powering on the phone is how similar the interface looks to the Nova N800's. Apparently it's an evolved version of the same firmware. This is not a coincidence because practically all Chinese phones run on the same kind of ‘operating system’ (Nucleus OS). As a consequence, the feature list is just a small step up from the Nova's:

• Quad-band GSM: again, this is what the seller claims. But contrary to the Nova, all sellers claim the same thing, so I'm pretty confident that this phone really is quad-band.
• LCD Touch screen, 1.8", 176×220 pixels: a very nice step up from the Nova's and most other watch phones' tiny screens. This screen is as wide as the Nova's screen was tall, and there are no thick bezels around it.
• Camera: the camera is identical to the Nova's, it's still only 640×480 resolution but it does take much sharper pictures even at macro distance.
• Handwriting recognition: I find myself using this a lot more than on the Nova, probably thanks to the larger screen and the lack of bezels, but also due to the difficult-to-read on-screen keyboard.
• MicroSD card slot: (under the battery) supports up to 8GB (supposedly, probably 2GB in reality).
• MP3 and AAC music playback and MP4 movie playback. Video is identical to the Nova, and despite the larger screen, it still is mostly useless except for showing your friends that your watch can play videos.
• Bluetooth: both for connecting to a bluetooth headset, and for transferring data.
• Compass: that's right, it has an actual hardware compass. It requires occasional calibration by horizontally rotating the phone two cycles. You will want to do this with the watch off your wrist, lest you want to attract strange looks from bystanders.
• FM Radio: unfortunately this only works if you plug in a wired headset, which makes sense because it needs the wires to act as an antenna.
• Thin: the entire body is 13mm thick, which makes this one of the thinnest watch phones, and it is actually wearable under a shirt.
• Good signal reception: it has a much better antenna than the Nova. I can call with this phone in places where the Nova had zero reception.

Now, if you have read my review of the Nova N800, you will notice the lack of a feature that I considered a conditio sine qua non for me to buy a watch phone. This phone has no detachable wristband, and worse: the strap is a simple classic leather band that doesn't even have a quick-release clasp. Yet, the large screen, the thin body and the design won me over to buy this thing after all. I figured that I could replace the strap with a quick-release one, which would make this phone usable without having to always carry a Bluetooth headset. More about this later on…

Beware: some sellers claim that this phone has Java support. It does not, at least not mine. There is no trace of Java in the firmware. You cannot install anything, except perhaps special binaries (but nobody would bother making any). It is not impossible that there is a variation of this phone that does support Java, but it is unlikely. If a seller really claims to sell a model with Java, ask for actual photos of java apps running on the phone.

Comparison between the camera of the Nova N800 (left) and the camera in this watch phone (right). Click the image to see the right photo in its original resolution.

Usability

Of course, one of the first things I checked was the battery life or autonomy. The batteries of the ‘S9110’ only have 480 mAh, 67% of the capacity of the Nova's. Given the fact that the screen is larger and the phone seems to run faster overall, I feared for the battery life. However, my first tests indicate that the phone can run for slightly longer than four full days on one charge when not used intensively (a few short calls, checking the time now and then, taking a few photos, bluetooth mostly off). That's less than the 120 hours the seller claims, but it is slightly better than 67% of the autonomy of the Nova and still OK for such a thin and small gadget. Charging the battery is done through the USB cable, which you can either plug into the wall charger or an USB port on a PC. The cable does not have a standard mini-USB plug this time, but some proprietary plug that is also used on other popular Chinese phones like the i9. However, the pin-out of the plug is different from any other phone that uses this shape of plug. The concept of ‘standardisation’ doesn't seem to have seeped through in China.

The Nova N800 vs. the ‘Fashion’ S9110 clone. Overall, both phones have the same size when looking from above, but the Nova is much thicker. The screen on the new phone is much larger but unfortunately not as bright.

Since this phone has basically an evolved version of the same firmware as the Nova, it is pretty much the same in general use. However, the larger screen makes it easier to control. On the other hand it only has three hardware buttons where the Nova had six. Instead of dedicated buttons to scroll up and down in menus, there is only one button that scrolls down in most cases, and in other cases causes you to accidentally call the first person from your address book or does nothing. The actual function of this button changes depending on what part of the interface you're in. I wish it would just always mean ‘scroll down’, or had been a dual scroll up/down button.

The only drawback of the lack of a bezel around the screen (like on the Nova) is that there is nothing to protect it from the outside world. As a result, I already procured a large scratch after a few months because I forgot to take off the phone before rummaging through junk in the attic. Since then, it has collected some additional smaller scratches. It could be a good idea to buy a generic screen protector film and cut it to the right size, or to buy protectors for the Samsung S9110 which should fit right away. This could however reduce the responsiveness of the touch screen.

The largest nuisance I encountered is the poor legibility of the on-screen keyboard. Gray letters on top of a slightly lighter gray background, what were they thinking? It is almost unreadable (see photo). And there is no way to change the colour scheme. This is another reason to use handwriting recognition, although you can still type a lot faster with a stylus if you have good eyesight or know the lay-out of the keyboard. Handwriting recognition would also be more useful if it were possible to write numbers while the keyboard is set to ABC, but unless I'm missing something it really is necessary to switch the keyboard between numbers and letters.
A smaller nuisance is that the screen is not as responsive as the Nova's. It requires more force, especially at the edges. But after a while I got used to this, and the screen also seems to become more ‘flexible’ through usage.

Unfortunately this ‘watch’ phone still is unable to display the time continuously when in stand-by, so it still is a lousy watch. However, the time display pops up almost instantaneously when pressing a button, and is very large. So it is definitely an improvement upon the Nova, which needed about two seconds to wake up from sleep, and displayed a small clock on its small screen. However, the screen is less bright than the Nova's, hard to read in bright conditions and pretty much unreadable in direct sunlight. The clock also lacks a date display (you need to unlock the screen to see the date). Another step back from the Nova is that the clock immediately stops ticking upon removal of the battery. This means if you remove the battery for two minutes, the clock will lag two minutes behind, and the date risks being reset. Not a big deal if you always remember to check the time after having removed the battery or if you enable auto updating of time&date, but an extra capacitor could have avoided this.

The strap is quite stiff and not easy to open and close. It seems to be real leather as indicated (at least the underside), but it doesn't look as if it will really last long. However, replacing the strap is problematic to say the least as you can read in the ‘Hacking’ section. As with the Nova, a tiny telescopic stylus is built into the band, and this one is slightly longer when fully extended.

Making calls

Now, coming back to the issue of making and answering calls. When looking at the photos, you may wonder if it is at all possible to make a phone call without any kind of headset due to the apparent lack of a loudspeaker and microphone. I also was unsure about this, and ordering it was a bit of a gamble given my reluctance to have to rely on a headset. But no (immediate) worries: there is an actual loudspeaker on the left side, and a microphone at the bottom where the strap connects to the phone. The loudspeaker is not very loud in normal mode, but can be switched to ‘hands-free’ which makes it more than loud enough to use the watch as a normal phone in a noisy environment. This means that initiating calls yourself is not problematic despite the cumbersome strap, because you have ample time to open it carefully and slowly, and then use the watch as an (admittedly funny looking) hand-held phone.

However, answering calls is a different story. What are your options? First, opening the strap so you can use it as a regular phone is problematic because I am certain that no caller will be patient enough to wait until you are done fumbling with the clasp and stiff strap. Next, holding your wrist against your ear will cause cramp in your arm in no time and will get you very weird looks from bystanders, so nobody will want to do this. Next, the hands-free setting does allow to hear the caller without making funny movements, but is only feasible in silent environments with no people around you that you don't want to annoy or share your entire conversation with. There is also the option to use the wired headset, but it will require as much time as opening the strap to fumble open the tiny I/O port on the phone, untangle the headset's wires and plug it in. The only practical option is a Bluetooth headset and always enabling BT, which will eat away from the battery life. There is another option as discussed in the ‘hacking’ section, but it is not for everyone.

Build Quality

Like the Nova, this phone looks well-built. The seller claimed that the body is stainless steel, but I doubt it. Judging from the weight it does seem to be some kind of metal with a dark glossy coating. At any rate it sure does look a lot better than the Nova's plastic case. The overall finish of this gadget is very nice. The only thing that bothers me is the small charge port connector cover (see photo), which seems flimsy and prone to breakage in the not-so-far future.
Note 2011/10/20: the dark coating is starting to show some wear, most of which appears due to exposure to sweat. I recommend taking off the watch when performing sports, and regularly cleaning it.

As for the software, given that it is an evolved version of the Nova's soft-/firmware which was already pretty good, it is even better in most aspects. The most annoying bugs that were present in the Nova are fixed, and the number of bugs I discovered is small. One particularly annoying bug is that the phone forgets all paired Bluetooth devices between reboots, therefore if you turn off the phone you will need to re-pair with e.g. your BT headset.

The WAP browser is a lot better than on the Nova. By default it identifies itself as “MAUI_WAP_Browser”. Next to finally being able to display Google's WAP pages, it is much faster, allows arbitrary scrolling both vertically and horizontally, supports animated GIF and PNG and some more WAP features. The only problems are that regardless of the phone's language setting, it prefers the Chinese version of websites when available (even though the Chinese font is not installed), and that error messages are cut off (“Connection…”).
The image viewer has also improved: it now allows zooming, panning, and viewing photos in full screen by rotating them.

Some things have stayed the same, like the impossibility to route the audio to a Bluetooth headset during video playback. A few other things went backwards however: the camera doesn't store any EXIF information in the images anymore, so you can't see when you took a picture unless you rely on the volatile file modification date. When replying to an SMS, it no longer seems possible to save your reply. Also, the sent SMS messages that can be saved still don't have a date stamp, why not? It's not like a date requires a huge amount of memory. I like to see what I sent to people and also when I sent it. I don't want to waste neurons on things for which mankind has invented computers.

I did have one case where the phone appeared to have ‘crashed’ and prompted me to ‘recover’, which caused many of the settings to revert to defaults. Luckily my address book and messages were unaffected but the WAP bookmarks were gone, so I hope this won't happen again. Several months have passed since then without problems. I guess it was just a fluke.

Hacking

If you have read my other articles, you should know that I'm not the kind of guy that just buys and uses stuff. I'm an engineer. If something bothers me about a product of which warranty has expired or is hard to exploit anyway, I try to fix it myself.

Installing a custom watch strap

When buying this phone, I kind of counted on being able to replace the cumbersome (and to my opinion slightly ugly) strap. If I could fit a strap with a quick-release clasp mechanism, it would be the next best thing to having a detachable wristband like on the Nova. So I ordered a nice rubber 24mm strap from ZRC with a fancy ‘tyre’ pattern and folding clasp. Once it arrived, I started replacing the strap. This seemed easy at first: just unscrew the four little screws, shift the mounting tubes out of the leather strap and into the new strap, screw everything back in and then shorten the rubber strap. However, when I unscrewed the upper part of the strap (voiding any chance of warranty because this required breaking a seal), I suddenly discovered why this phone has such good signal reception. The antennas for both the GSM signal and Bluetooth are cleverly routed into the strap through the hollow mounting bar (see photo). In other words, the strap is the antenna. This is neat, but it surely makes replacing the strap seemingly impossible.

However, I really like this watch phone and I really disliked the prospect of having to ensure that I always have a charged Bluetooth headset handy to be able to answer calls. Hence I made the impossible possible by building my own antennas into my replacement strap. This involved the following operations:

1. Moving the hollow mounting tube from the lower strap to the new upper strap, because the mounting tube from the original upper strap cannot be removed/reused without destroying the strap (I want to keep it just in case).
2. Cutting a new mounting bar from a 2mm stainless steel wire for the lower part of the strap.
3. Drilling two tiny holes through the strap and the mounting tube at a very small angle.
4. Cutting grooves into the new strap to mount the wires.
5. Inserting thin wires of appropriate lengths through the holes and tube and pushing them into the grooves.
6. Last but not least: completely taking the entire phone apart to be able to desolder the RF antenna and solder the new antenna. This is because the RF antenna is soldered at the back of the PCB.

To make it absolutely clear: this phone is not sold with this strap.

The operation was a success: I can now remove the phone from my wrist quite quickly and signal reception is at least as good as with the original strap. The only disadvantage is that it is harder to open the bottom cover to swap the battery or microSD card. Anyhow, if it isn't clear enough from this description: replacing the strap on this watch phone while maintaining good signal reception is not trivial. The antennas cannot be omitted or you will have virtually no signal. And no, I will not build antennas into your custom strap and mount it on your watch phone, so please don't ask.

Hacking the firmware

One of the biggest problems with this phone, the nearly unreadable keyboard (see above), can be solved by hacking the firmware. Completely disassembling the phone had as advantage that I could see what makes it ‘tick’: the CPU is a MTK MT6225A. I found instructions on the web on how to download the firmware from other Chinese phones with similar CPUs, and they also apply to this phone. The firmware is also 16MiB in size, therefore you should set the download length to “0x01000000”. The only problem is that nobody sells a firmware cable for the Chinese ‘S9110’, therefore the only option was to make my own. I bought a cable for an i9 phone from IPMart and modified it after figuring out the correct pin-out, which you can find below. For a firmware cable you only need to connect pins 2, 7 and 8.

• Pin 1: probably GND for headset (not sure)
• Pin 2: signal GND
• Pins 3 to 5: headset, FM antenna, microphone (not in this order)
• Pin 6: ?
• Pin 7: serial Tx (signal coming out of phone)
• Pin 8: serial Rx (signal going into phone)
• Pin 9: USB D+ (green wire)
• Pin 10: USB D- (white wire)
• Pin 11: ?
• Pin 12: USB 5V

If you can obtain the correct 12-pin plug with resolderable pins, you can make your own firmware cable with any USB→TTL adaptor. This has a good chance of being much better than the ho-hum cable from IPMart, which was unable to work reliably at more than 57.6 kbps. With my own adaptor I can download and upload at a whopping 921.6 kbps!

Fixing things like the WAP browser's preference for Chinese is trivial (replace the string “zh-tw,zh-cn,en”), but the keyboard problem proved to be more difficult. I had hoped that the keyboards would be stored as simple GIF or BMP images, but I found nothing keyboard-like when extracting all known formats from the firmware dump. After randomly scrolling in a hex editor I finally stumbled upon the bitmaps for the keyboard backgrounds, and I managed to make them white. I also would like to make the letters black, but that seems to be extremely non-trivial. Anyway, dark gray on white is already a huge improvement.

If you want to perform this hack yourself, you can download the updated firmware chunk here. Instructions are included. Make sure to back up your phone's firmware before attempting this.

The code to get in Engineer Mode (on my firmware) is *#36466336#. Needless to say you should only use this if you know what you're doing, and preferably have a back-up of your firmware. Make sure not to activate ‘High Speed SIM’, which is rumoured to instantly brick your phone. There is one thing that is very useful though: in the ‘Misc.’ → ‘WAP’ menu, you should change the User Agent to ‘SE W800i’ and ‘Accept Header’ to HTML, which will both reduce the risk of getting the “Memory full” error and allow to open more webpages.

As I'm currently learning Chinese, I was disappointed that my S9110 did not have any Chinese language support (简体中文). I could cheaply order the plastic ‘F6’ twin of this phone though, with Chinese firmware. So I did, and I copied the firmware to my S9110 with success. Of course I had to repeat the keyboard hack but now I can learn and practice Chinese on my wristwatch, how cool is that?

Conclusion

As usual, let's stack up the pros versus the cons for the Chinese ‘S9110’ watch phone.

Pros

• A reasonably priced quad-band GSM phone with Bluetooth connectivity on your wrist.
• It is one of the thinnest watch phones available and is much more reasonably priced than similar models from LG and Samsung.
• A pretty large 1.8" screen with a reasonably small frame around it.
• Only 13mm thick, so it can be worn under a shirt.
• Finally a good-looking watch phone, it stands out amidst its ugly rubber and plastic brethren.
• Good signal reception (it is optimal when the phone is removed from the wrist).
• OK battery life, it can run about four days without having to plug in the cable. This can be doubled by keeping the spare battery handy.
• The camera is decent for being so tiny.

Cons

• The on-screen keyboard is too low contrast, and practically unreadable. Really, if any of you Chinese who built this thing read this, please fix it. Go ahead and use my fix.
• It is not detachable from the strap and the strap cannot be easily opened, which means answering calls by holding the phone to your ear can only be done by risking severe arm cramp and looking like an idiot. The phone can be set in ‘hands-free’ mode, but this is unusable in noisy environments or if you don't want everyone around you to follow your conversation. Hence this phone is only usable if you always carry a Bluetooth headset and have Bluetooth on all the time, which will reduce battery life.
• Replacing the strap is impossible unless you are very handy with tools, are prepared to completely disassemble the phone and know something about antennas. This means that once the strap breaks, the phone will become unusable for normal people.
• Longer battery life would have been better, but is probably not feasible for such a small gadget.
• No continuous time display (but the time does show up quickly when pressing a button). I would also have liked a date display on the clock.
• While other manufacturers have agreed on using the micro-USB standard, the I/O and charging cable for this phone is completely proprietary, it isn't even compatible with other phones that use the same shape of plug.
• The screen is not very bright, and is unreadable in direct sunlight. I have the feeling the brightness was dimmed on purpose to improve battery life, but there's no way to adjust it.
• Time and date may get messed up after replacing the battery, and powering off the phone erases the list of paired Bluetooth devices.
• ‘Fashion’ is not an attractive brand name, which would not be such a problem if this word wasn't printed below the screen in such a large ugly logo.

The bottom line is that this is a great watch phone under certain conditions. Those conditions are that you're either a hacker who is handy with tools and tiny electronics, or that you are willing to always carry a Bluetooth headset to make and answer calls, and take great care of the strap such as to prevent it from wearing quickly.

It is in many ways an improvement upon the Nova N800, but it is still far away from my ideal view of a watch phone, in the sense that it:

• cannot transform between a wristwatch and a regular hand-held in a split second,
• still does not show the time continuously while in stand-by,
• still does not offer more than a week of autonomy in stand-by mode,
• still does not have a screen that covers virtually the entire top surface,
• is not water resistant,
• requires a proprietary charging/data cable.

Also, I hope 3G will soon find its way into the realm of watch phones. It is not essential for the phone as such because nobody will download large webpages on the tiny screen anyway, but it would make it much more useful for tethering. GPRS is just ancient.

The fact that the strap proves to be a good place to house antennas may speak against the idea of a watch phone detachable from its wristband, as I have always advocated. Yet, the Nova had decent signal reception and it was detachable. With some innovation, it must be possible to combine detachability with a good antenna. If you are a designer of watch phones and decide on a fixed strap, make it a type that is durable and can be opened quickly and easily.

Successors

Fashion F6

Recently I found another model of the same ‘Fashion’ brand, named the ‘F6’. I actually bought one to obtain firmware with Chinese language support for my S9110 (and then resold it). The F6 looks less stylish because it's all plastic, but the hardware, batteries and firmware are otherwise identical (including the annoyingly unreadable keyboard). In case you're wondering: the big red ‘button’ below the screen is purely decorational. Next to the obvious difference in appearance with the S9110, there are differences in some small but not unimportant details.

First of all, the F6 is much lighter than the S9110 because it is all plastic. It is slightly thicker though, about 14mm. The strap is rubber but still a classic type: no quick-release. There is no way the strap can be replaced, not even with the best hacking skillz. The USB/charger and headset plugs for the F6 are identical to the S9110 except for the fact that they are slightly longer. This is necessary because the socket is deeper. In other words, the F6 cables will also work on the S9110, but not the other way round. Something peculiar is that on the F6 the ‘Display’ menu is missing, even if the S9110's firmware is copied onto it! This does not allow changing the ‘Themes’, but the wallpaper and power on/off animations can still be changed by browsing to the desired image in the ‘Gallery’ and using the ‘Forward’ item in the ‘Options’ menu.

2011/05/18: W818 Watch Phone

During my occasional sweep of watch phone offerings I discovered a new interesting model. It is called the ‘W818’ and judging from some photos it may be manufactured by the same company as my old Nova N800. It is without any doubt the best looking watch phone I have seen until now. Some plus points are that it is waterproof, has a stainless steel band with quick-release clasp, and Java support. It also appears to use microUSB, at last. The problems with it are that the USB port can only be accessed by unscrewing two screws, which is why the phone is sold with a screwdriver key ring. Given that the phone will need to be charged every few days, you'll be unscrewing and screwing a lot. That's a pretty poor design decision. The screen is only 128x128 pixels, which is tiny. The number of Java apps that will work on such small resolution will be limited, and reading text messages or webpages will be awkward. Really, that is a big step backward. The screen is claimed to be OLED but is as low-contrast as the S9110's as far as I can see from some vendor photos. Also, still no 3G. And last but not least, I'm worried about signal reception with an all stainless steel design. Unless they did something really fancy the antenna can only be placed somewhere under the screen.

There is another model that is obviously based on the same hardware but looks like a smaller version of the S9110, it appears to be named ‘V5’. This is yet another nice evolution in the watch phone market, but on some fronts it is a step backward. Maybe some day, some company will be able to combine all good traits into a single design. Until then I'll stick to my ‘S9110’.

2011/10/15: X8 and TW810 Watch Phones

Another evolution in the watch phone market has arrived: Wi-Fi on your wrist! There is a new model called the “X8” which has both Wi-Fi and Java support. It has a keypad built into the strap, and the strap is a metal quick-release type. The only big drawback about this model seems to be that it is… well, big. It is 17mm thick which makes it a bit of a brick. That's probably the price to pay for having so much technology on your wrist, but I hope that further miniaturisation will in the near future produce slimmer watch phones with WLAN as well as EDGE/3G. Check out a review of the X8 on Joe's Tech Review.

Another very interesting new model is the TW810. It does not have wi-fi but it has a very nice design with an all-metal quick-release strap like the X8. In fact I consider this the best-looking watch phone available at the moment. It has the highest screen resolution I have ever seen on a watch phone: 240×240 pixels in a 1.6" screen. Most likely this is the exact same screen as used on the iPod Nano. Combined with Java support, that should make it a very useful watch phone. The screen has a subtle bezel around it that should help to protect against damage. It does have a few bad points however: it only has a front-facing camera, it is not remotely water-resistant, it lacks some hardware buttons required to make many Java apps work, and it does not have an on-screen keyboard. The only way to input text is through a simulation of primitive GSM-style multitap or through handwriting, both of which are slow and limited. I really don't get why a watch phone with such an advanced high-resolution screen aspires to simulate the most primitive cell phone keyboard. That is a deal-breaker for me, so I'm still waiting for the ideal watch phone model…

2012/04/13: Assassin Dusk (W960)

This is an interesting new addition. What makes this watch phone stand out is that it has a very nice design combined with good branding. It has a cool name and a logo obviously inspired by Assassin's Creed. The eBay page I found for this model has perfect English and despite the fact that the description tries to set the phone's features apart from the others while it is still the same hardware, the list of features is honest. All this could make me seriously consider buying it if I needed a new watch phone. What puts me off however is that it is obviously still the same basic hardware packaged in a new beautiful shell. Also, it is bulky with a screen that only covers a relatively small proportion of the entire surface. And it has poor battery life.

2012/05/10: Pebble E-Paper Watch

Now this would be an ideal watch phone for me, if it had been a watch phone. It looks good, has an e-paper display with backlight (so this is possible after all), continuous time display, good battery life, and is waterproof. The only minuses are that the screen is still relatively small compared to the size of the entire device, it is not a touch screen, and most obviously, it is not a phone. It is only a Bluetooth device that requires a smartphone to do anything else than acting like a plain watch.

My Ideal Watch Phone, update

In my old review of the Nova N800, I made a list of features that I would like to see on an ideal watch phone. I thought it may be a good idea to update this based on what I've seen on watch phones since then and the current state of technology.

• It must show the time continuously while in stand-by. After all, it is supposed to be a watch phone. There must be an option to show the date as well. I know it is a challenge to implement this in a way that does not drain the battery, but try to be a little innovative.
• It should be quad-band, have Bluetooth and one or more additional connection technologies faster than GPRS. For instance, EDGE, 3G and/or Wi-Fi. Of course, the signal reception must be good. It must be possible to enable or disable Bluetooth etc. quickly without having to dig through many menus.
• Easily usable as a handheld phone without any external headsets. Either the wristband must be quick and easy to open, or the phone itself must be quickly detachable from the strap. It must have a good built-in loudspeaker and microphone.
• Thin and elegant. Something with the overall size and looks of the TW810 and the thickness of the S9110 would be perfect.
• Long battery life: a full week of stand-by or more would be great. Charging and data transfer must be possible using a standard micro-usb cable.
• Practically the entire top surface of the device should be one big high-resolution touchscreen with no wasteful borders. The display must be either extremely durable or have a small bezel around it (like the TW810) to protect it from damage. The display must be readable in direct sunlight. The brightness must be adjustable. What would be extremely cool is a round watch with a true round display, not a square inefficiently crammed inside a circle.
• All basic functions on the display can be controlled without a stylus: calling, browsing addresses and entering the PIN code must be easy to do with fingers only. It should have handwriting recognition for easy entry of short texts in situations where using a stylus is inconvenient. However, the interface must include a full-size on-screen keyboard as well, that can be operated with a stylus for fast entry of longer texts and symbols. (Obviously, to compensate for its small size this keyboard must be high-contrast, not like the one on the S9110.)
• There must be hardware buttons for ‘menu’, ‘enter’, ‘up’ and ‘down’, and preferably also ‘cancel’. These buttons must always behave the same in every part of the interface. It must be possible to use these buttons to operate all essential functions of the phone even if the touchscreen is dead.
• At least water resistant, if possible fully waterproof. It should at least be able to survive a bike ride through a rain shower.
• It supports input and display for many languages (including Chinese). Or it should be possible to install language packs.
• It has a good built-in web browser or allows to install a recent Java-based browser. It has enough memory (RAM) to display large web pages. The web browser supports file upload. What would also be cool is a way to play live audio or even video streams.
• It should have a camera positioned at the top side of the phone (like on the S9110) that can take sharp photos up to a macro distance of about 5cm. A front-facing camera is not a substitute for a sideways-facing camera. In other words, if there is a front-facing camera then there must be two cameras on the phone. It is OK if the resolution is only 640×480, if the photos are always perfectly sharp. True 1.3 MPixel would be better though.

What bothers me most about all current watch phones is that they are still variations on the same old theme, software-wise. Not much has improved since my old Nova N800. It is getting time for a radical upgrade of the old Nucleus-based OS that keeps on being recycled in these phones. I want to see better handling of SMS messages, a better address book, a better calendar, and a better web browser.

Links

A good place for information on the latest new watch phone models and good deals for buying them, is Joe's Tech Review.