Katherine Mankiller

Merry Consumermas!

With a couple of caveats, this is a great cellphone. Basically, it's cute and full of Dick Tracy fun, but it's also a cellphone only a geek could love sometimes.

Pros:

• Fun.
• Cute.
• Your phone is always handy on your wrist. No more beeperlepsy!
• It comes with bluetooth, so you don't have to talk into your watch if you don't want to.
• You can talk into your watch if you want to!
• It can also play mp3s and videos.

Cons:

• Weak antenna--I have trouble getting a signal some places, sigh.
• Mine came with W32/RJump pre-installed for my convenience.
• I've managed to crash the WAP browser a couple of times. I hear this is SOP for WAP browsers. *shrug*
• 120 character limit on text field entry, but unless you have good eyes for the tiny onscreen keyboard or patience for the handwriting recognition, that might not be a problem for you.

Things that may be a positive or negative depending on your personal taste:

• The anime graphics that come with the phone are really cute. I didn't expect to like them, because I'm not always the biggest fan of cute, but I do! If you're, to quote Think Geek, "Mr. Super Manly Man who is a afraid of a little cute," well... YMMV.
• The phone works with AT&T and T-Mobile, but you have to set up your own WAP settings or there will be no web surfing for you on the teeny tiny screen. I found setting up WAP fun, so this was a positive for me, but I'm a geek.

The manual reads like someone took the Chinese version and ran it through Babelfish. I find the result amusing but not very informative. A random example: "Do not put battery at machine impactive places, and poke battery with hard things."

As for the W32/RJump, it's a Windows executable, so the cellphone itself wasn't infected, and if you use linux or Mac you can't catch it (but delete autorun.inf, RavMon.exe, and Ghost.pif anyway). If you run Windows, update your antivirus. It's delivered through Generic!atr, and virus definitions have been able to catch that for over a year. (It's a worm that spreads itself through removable media. The cellphone watch acts as removable media to allow you to copy your multimedia files over, so it's possible someone just tested it on an infected machine.)

If you want to see the watch in action, this guy is trying to sell 'em on eBay in English. There's also a Chinese demo that shows the handwriting recognition, and an Italian demo that shows the menus.

Overall? Four paws and a wireless access point up.