Check me out ladies. I got me a spy watch. I’m just like James Bond, but with an added belly and some questionable reasons for actually owning one.
This, it has to be said, does exactly what it says on the tin. There’s two batteries inside – one for powering the watch part and for keeping the hands moving round. The other is charged by USB, but as a USB port can’t quite fit here you instead plug in a 2.5mm plug into the side of the watch.
The watch is splash proof but, as you’ll see by these pictures, quite thick. It just gets away with this to be honest, mostly thanks to the design of the thing and the thick and strong strap. That strap is rubberised with red stitching and it’s comfortable to wear.
Around the face of the watch there’s a rotating bezel which you can perhaps use to measure how much time has passed. On the face itself you’ll also find a painted set of hands that actually don’t do anything at all. I wasn’t really sure what these were for, but they add to the design.
On the lower right of the watch face, between “4” and “5” is an LED that’ll tell you when the camera is active, when the camera battery is charging and when you’re filming or taking a photo. All shots are taken from a small camera at the very bottom of the watch face and there’s 4GB of on-board storage (no microSD card to worry about) which appears as mass storage when you connect it to your computer.
The supplied cable plugs into the side of the watch so that you can grab your images later. Here’s a look at the other buttons and, with the aid of a diagram from the manual, here’s what all the buttons do..
The top left, number 4, is the “Mode” button. You short-press this to take a photo, or long-press it and you can record audio. So, if you want to make a recording of someone speaking then you can do that too.
Button number 3 is, once you’ve unscrewed, the port for the USB cable. Button number 2 is the button which powers on the camera power via a long-press. You can press once to record or stop a video.
The top-right one, number 6, is the microphone, and number 7 is where you set the time.
Here’s my video overview to try and explain it a bit more..
The watch is waterproof and takes videos of 1280 x 960, with images at 3264 x 2448. It’s a 2 megapixel camera, and below you can see some of the best shots I captured.
The pictures are pretty washed out if I’m honest. It’s a fixed focus and the images aren’t helped by the fact that the actual lens is several millimetres behind the plastic outer glass of the watch, so you get light reflecting all over the place and shots are pretty sub-standard. However, they’re perhaps “OK” if you’re just looking to get a sneaky shot of something and don’t mind the resolution too much.
Videos don’t get much better, although strangely colours are good. It jumps around and it just seems like there’s not enough brain-power inside the watch to store or capture the video quickly enough. Here’s the upshot, and please don’t ask me what the hell is going on with the audio. I didn’t have the lawn-mower on, it was a lovely peaceful garden and it didn’t capture any of my test phrases or the birds in the background.
Overall, if you want to record a bit of audio or take a very grainy snap and a jumpy video with terrible sound, it could be worth a gamble. Maplin are selling these for £39.99.
However, I can’t recommend it at all. It does tell the time well though.
