Nova N800 Watch Phone Review

Is it a watch? Is it a GSM cell phone? It's both!

Making phone calls with your watch was until a few years ago only reserved for James Bond and other spies in movies and comic books. But miniaturization has finally come to the point where it is feasible to put an entire cell phone, including some extras, into a wristwatch-shaped device. One of the very first models was the CECT F88, also sold as the ‘Telson TWC 1150’. It was a hideous and unwieldly thing, more like a regular-sized cell phone turned 90° to the left and equipped with a strap. But it was the starting point of the development of ever shrinking devices. I wouldn't say we have reached the point yet where these devices have become both elegant and practical, but we're coming closer. In May 2008, we were already close enough for me to get one and test it out.

The Nova N800

I discovered these gadgets merely by accident. I was looking for a simple headset on eBay when I found a peculiar-looking thing amidst the search results. Named ‘G108’, it looked a lot like the communicator from the graphic novel ‘The Time Trap’ from the Belgian Mortimer & Blake series: a disc-shaped device that could be flipped open to reveal a tiny monitor and a key pad. To my surprise, it proved to be a fully functional GSM phone. I'm a sucker for gadgets, so I immediately started doing some research. After a while I had made a round-up of about every existing model. I won't repeat the entire evaluation procedure here which I used to pick the overall best one, but the N800 was the winner. Main selling points are the detachability from its wristband and seemingly good battery life (which was more like an educated guess because all sellers give a different estimate for this).

Nova N800 Wrist Watch Phone

You can buy these things at various places, like specialized online shops (you could try the ads at the bottom of this page if they are relevant). However, if you're willing to dig through eBay for a while, you can get them cheaper. 10 years ago you'd have thought that these gadgets would originate from Japan, but times appear to have changed. All these watch phones come from China. It seems that China is following a similar evolution as Japan a few decades ago: they're moving from simply copying designs to actually designing their own, and they're getting better at it. I showed this watch phone to a Japanese guy and he was actually surprised. Although similar devices do exist in Japan, e.g. the Wristomo, they don't seem to evolve or become popular as fast as their Chinese counterparts. Don't fall asleep, Japan! Mind that GSM is not used in Japan, so we'll never see a Japanese GSM watch.

It has to be said, the Nova N800 is a clone from a Korean watch phone, the Hyundai W100, which was also one of the first of this type. But, the W100 is actually built by CECT, which is a Chinese company after all. (Its website used to be www.cectelecom.com, but seems dead now.)

So I went for a seller in Hong Kong on eBay. The transaction was smooth and the net total was USD200, or €133, a reasonable price for a cell phone. For this, I got:

Side view

Features

For its size, this thing packs an impressive amount of features. The most important are:

Detachable wrist band and stylus
This photo shows both the tiny telescopic stylus (fits in a hole in the strap) and how the device can be detached from the wristband. Detaching is easy with two buttons at the bottom sides of the phone.

Usability

Of course, the main reason why I bought this thing was that I am a sucker for gadgets and I simply had to try it even if I could find various reasons why it would be worthless. But, I couldn't find any major issues, and to be honest, I still haven't. I have been using this gizmo for a few months now, and it has proven to be surprisingly practical. The nice thing is that detaching it from the wristband turns it into a regular tiny phone that can be carried in your pocket. But, most of the time I do wear it as a watch.

Making a call

One of the main issues with any cell phone is battery life, or autonomy. Online stores claim values between 80 and 120 hours for standby, and up to 3 hours talk time. When I started using this gadget, 80 hours seemed realistic. After a few months of use, I did a more rigorous test by not charging it until it shut itself off. The phone was mostly in standby during this experiment, although I did make a few calls, took a few pictures, and activated the display often to check the time. Surprise: I got 140 hours of standby time, not bad at all! My proper treatment of the batteries probably helped: avoid discharging them completely, never leave them in a discharged state and cycle both batteries on a regular basis by swapping them every (few) week(s). The nice thing is that if you have the spare battery charged and within reach, you can double the autonomy. Charging the battery is done through the USB cable, which you can either plug into the wall charger or any available USB port on a PC. The USB port is a standard mini-usb, but unfortunately the pinout seems to be non-standard. If you try to charge it using another mini-USB cable, the device shuts down.

This gadget aspires to be both a watch and a cell phone, but despite the fact that is most closely resembles a watch, it by far works best as a phone. The problem with the watch part, is that it has an LCD display which drains power when turned on, so it goes into power save after a dozen seconds. This means that to see the time, you need to push a button, which is unpractical. There should be a way to make these devices behave like a proper watch when in stand-by. As a phone however, it's surprisingly practical. When it rings, I just press the release buttons to detach it from the wrist, and it becomes a regular phone. The speaker sounds good and none of the people on the other end have complained about the quality of the microphone. When the call is finished, I just press the thing back on its wrist strap. No digging inside pockets or backpacks, making a call is pretty much instantaneous. It also has a vibrating alarm, which you really can't miss. The first time I tried it, I had a mild sensation of getting an electric shock :)

Watching the trailer for ‘The Transporter 2’ in ‘full-screen’
Watching a movie trailer in ‘full-screen’. Unfortunately it seems impossible to route the sound through the bluetooth headphones, so the tinny speaker is the only option here.

Build Quality

People often mock the ‘Made in China’ brand for low quality, but this device is surprisingly well-built. Again, people also mocked the ‘Made in Japan’ label decades ago, but nobody will do this today. The same will probably happen with China. Because using warranty for this kind of thing would be a hassle anyway, I voided it by taking the device apart to see how it's built. Again, it looks pretty well built even on the inside. I had to use both considerable force and care while opening the case whose halves fit together very neatly, so this thing won't fall apart by itself and could probably take a beating. The circuit and soldering look clean, the only stain are some visible fingerprints on metal shielding parts. The camera is amazingly small, a cube of about 5mm, so given this knowledge, the less-than-stellar pictures it takes are not too bad.

Battery compartment

As for the software part, it has a similar “not top-of-the-line, but pretty good nevertheless” feel. There are no annoying delays, even the handwriting recognition is fast enough to be usable. There are only a few obvious bugs, like the inability to put the cursor back after the last character in text messages sometimes, and the ‘MR’ button in the calculator which will abort any pending operation (making the memory function nearly useless). The world clock is also quirky to say the least. The English translation of all menus is surprisingly good, even the English in the manual is amazingly devoid of the typical ‘Engrish’. People who still think China will keep on churning out junk with bad English manuals might want to review their opinion.

Update 2009/08/25: I've had the N800 for 15 months now, and it still works perfectly. There are only two notable glitches: one of the pushbuttons initially required much more force to operate than the others (but this problem has solved itself), and very occasionally it seems to ‘reboot’ spontaneously (as if the phone turns off and on again without needing to re-enter the PIN code). Then again, the expensive major-brand phone of a friend also does this, apparently it's a popular bug amongst phone manufacturers.
There is also an annoying bug in the WAP browser. Thanks to Microsoft, some websites use a non-standard “X-Content-Type-Options” HTTP header to avoid one of the gazillion bugs in Internet Explorer. Unfortunately the browser in the Nova mistakes this header for an “X-Content-Type” header and refuses to load the page. This makes for instance every Google webpage unusable.

Example photo
A photo taken with the (unmodified) camera. While taking the phone apart, I did the crazy effort of replacing the plastic lens cover with a piece of glass, which has slightly improved the picture quality. If there's enough light and one holds the camera still, pictures can look a lot more acceptable than this, but this image shows what to expect when just using it for point-and-shoot on a cloudy day. Hint for GIMP and Photoshop users: for this particular camera, most of the ‘blooming’ can be eliminated by performing a 30% unsharp mask with a radius of 10 pixels, followed by a 15% unsharp mask of 5 pixels.

Conclusion

The best way to summarize the Nova N800 is by reviewing its pros versus its cons.

Pros

Cons

My advice to manufacturers...

I believe gadgets like this have the potential to become popular, but not as they are now. If you work at CECT, LG, Samsung or any other company that considers designing watch phones, and are in any way involved in manufacturing these things, take some advice in consideration from someone who has actually used such a gadget (i.e., me). When showing this watch phone to my friends, each of them, without even thinking thoroughly about it, came up with a few reasons why they wouldn't want to buy one. The 3 same reasons always return. Reason 1: the current watch phones are still way too thick and therefore also mostly ugly. They make the wearer look like a nerd. Reason 2: battery life is mediocre: even the cheapest regular cell phone has a longer autonomy than the 3 days most of these things offer. Reason 3: despite the large size of the entire device, the screen itself is too small.

Most of my friends also wondered how to make a call. They believe that you either have to make very uncomfortable manoeuvres, open the strap to take off the phone, or have to lug a headset around. It's only when I show that the N800 can be instantly detached and used as a regular phone that they say: “well, that's clever”. So it won't suffice to make these phones thinner, prettier, more power efficient and with a comfortably large screen. The reason why people want to buy a gadget like this, is because they want to combine several different devices into one single device. They don't want to replace their watch + cell phone with a watch + headset. Requiring the user to use a headset is a no-no: the often overlooked feature of being able to easily use the watch like a normal telephone is a must!

It's not just the fact that carrying around a bluetooth headset nullifies the advantage of embedding a phone into a wristwatch. It's also that the headset is yet another battery-powered device that can run out of power and break at the most undesirable moments. Worse, most bluetooth headsets have no instantly visible accurate battery level indicator. The indicator is mostly limited to an alert that says your next phone call might be aborted halfway through. I consider batteries a necessary evil and I always strive to minimize the number of batteries that I need to take care of.
A good old wired headset is not a solution either. Just think of the horrible ritual of untangling the wires of your iPod earphones whenever you have dug them up from your pockets or backpack. Now, add a time limit of about 10 seconds to avoid missing a call, and remember that the headset doesn't ring nor vibrate, hence is not that easy to find. I hope I'm making my point clear that every phone should first of all be usable as a phone.

The ideal watch phone should look like this (I now have another page with an updated version of this list):

Mind that “a camera,” “the ability to play movies,” and even “a colour screen” are not in this list. Those are fun additions, but I wouldn't hesitate to buy a model that's thin and elegant without camera or MP4, in favor of a bulky one with those extras. The same goes for an expansion card slot: it's nice, but if the device can be made thinner and waterproof by either omitting any expansion slot or putting it under the battery, by all means do it!

G108 or M350

That very first watch phone I ever saw, the disc-shaped flip-open phone that goes under names like G108 and M350, was a close contender for the N800 in my round-up. It does fit two of my requirements not found on most or all other models: it is detachable and currently is the only wristphone with a small permanent OLED time display on the lid. But, it's way too bulky.

Update 2009/08: the LG and Samsung watch phones

So, after a long wait, LG finally released their much touted GD910 watch phone. And surprisingly, Samsung also unveiled their S9910 watch phone at approximately the same time, even though most people thought they had abandoned the idea. Now, with two watch phones available from major companies, let's go over my list of requirements again:

Now, there's one thing that is not in my list, although it's important too, and that is: price. And there's some real bad news on that front: the Samsung, at about €500, is very expensive for its limited feature set and the LG is outrageously expensive at about €900. The LG has more features though, so the price per feature is probably similar. But at this time I'd rather buy five Chinese watch phones for the price of one Samsung, chances are that at least one of them will be rather good.

If both the LG and Samsung would be more reasonably priced and I wouldn't mind fumbling with the strap to answer a call, I'd probably buy the LG. Its thickness is borderline, but it is quad-band while the Samsung is just yesteryear's dual-band, it is certainly water resistant while the Samsung might not be, it (probably) shows the time continuously as a watch should, while the Samsung probably doesn't. Finally, it certainly has an impressive standby time while the Samsung's seems rather mediocre: in one review I found a figure of 4 days, my Nova does better.

So although there are still some major hurdles for me to replace my trusty Nova with an offering from a less obscure brand, it's definitely going in the right direction. I hope more companies soon start releasing gadgets like this, so there's actual competition. The first company that can build a thin, stylish watch phone that is at least triple band, allows to answer calls without a BT headset or making uncomfortable gestures, is water resistant, has good autonomy and last but not least, is reasonably priced, will earn some profit through me. Judging from online forums and comments, such watch phone will sell like hotcakes. Until then, I'll stick with my admittedly bulky but otherwise pretty OK Nova N800.

Update 2009/11: CECT W968

Another interesting GSM watch from CECT has hit the market, the W968, aka ‘Galactus’. It scores very well on the design front: it looks like a regular stainless steel watch of pretty good build quality. It's still bulky though with a thickness of 17mm, and not detachable from the strap. The actual screen area is rather small and this makes the phone awkward to control, as evidenced by the demo videos I've seen. Even though it looks like it could withstand some water, I have found explicit warnings that it is not water-resistant. So no worthy replacement for my Nova either, but certainly another step in the right direction.

Update 2010/06: S9910 clone

I expected this, I was only unsure how long it would take: the Chinese have come with a clone of one of the major brand watch phones. The Samsung S9110 is the victim, and it is even sold under the same model number, sometimes even with a fake ‘SVMSUNG’ logo. It does look promising: even though it's not an exact copy of the S9110, it has a very similar design and the same screen, but for a fraction of the price. The screen is large with minimal borders, and it is only 13mm thick. As usual, specs vary between sellers, but it appears to be quad-band and to have the same battery life as the Nova N800. It even has a compass (not that I care). It looks pretty good, aside from an ugly large “Fashion” logo on the front. I couldn't resist ordering one, even though it does not meet my basic easy-to-remove-from-wrist requirement. After a tortuous experience with customs and taxes, it arrived two months late. You can read the review here.

Update 2010/10: Phone with built-in BT earpiece

The Chinese have come up with a new clever idea to improve convenience when answering calls. A new model named ‘Royale’ features a tiny BlueTooth earpiece that is stored inside the watch. Answering a call amounts to taking out the earpiece and sticking it in your ear. I have serious doubts about how practical this really is, but at least it shows they're trying to innovate.

Update 2012/11: Nova N588

A ‘new’ model has been released under the Nova name and it is very similar to the N800. It is obviously nothing else than the same design and hardware with some minor tweaks. The front surface is now flat with glass-like buttons and it is available in a choice of multiple colours (some more dubious than others), but otherwise it looks the same and the screenshots from the interface look identical to what I remember from my Nova N800. It seems the Chinese are still not inclined or capable to innovate on the hardware and software front, they only keep on churning out the same devices in different housings.

A good place for information on the latest new watch phone models and good deals for buying them, is Joe's Tech Review (unfortunately now defunct, URL used to be joestechreview.ning.com).

©2008/08-2009/08 Alexander Thomas