Brando MP4 Watch

By Richard Bland, Combined Effort Consulting, 12 Aug 2006.

The model I bought was from here. It was USD 138, including shipping from Hong Kong to the UK. I opted for the 2GB model (a must considering the caveats below).

First up, let me tell you what this watch isn't. It can't play MP4/AVI natively - they have to go through a conversion process first. The same is true for JPEG images. MP3's do play natively and I've also had some success with recording native MP3 from the inbuilt microphone.

The above conversion process is via some Windows-only software called NxvConverter. As far as I can tell, the software uncompresses the images / video to a format the watch can cope with - I assume this is because processing power on the watch is such that it can't decompress video on-the-fly and has to have a somewhat 'raw' format.

The upshot of this conversion process is that videos do become more bloated when put onto the watch. For example, I converted a 664MB DIVX AVI (480x256, 24bpp, 25 fps) to a 128x96 NXV video and ended up with a 2.5GB file. Admitedly, this was on the 'High' quality settings, but dropping it down to 'Low' quality resulted in a 450MB file that was pretty much unwatchable. the 'Medium' Quality setting would have ended up with 1.2GB file.

The watch comes preloaded with a few images and MP3s and the 'Crazy Frog' video. This was good, as it gave me an opportunity to analyse the video in mplayer to see what the NXV format 'really' was. As it turns out mplayer couldn't make head-or-tail of it so my hopes of being able to avoid the NxvConverter software seem a bit of a pipe dream.

The 'watch face' is illuminated by a button press, but it takes a good second for this to register and the clock will disappear after about 5 seconds. There doesn't seem to be a way of keeping the clock on permanently, but then I guess this would be a drain on the battery. However, you can keep images / videos on the screen permanently, so make of that what you will.

So, all in all, I would say the watch doesn't really do what it claims (native MP4/JPEG), BUT it's still a fairly cool item to have.

About the Author

Richard Bland is the Senior Software Engineer at Combined Effort Consulting Limited. Richard is based in Leicester, UK and has worked in the IT Industry for over 10 years, specialising in Database, Web and Win32 development.