This article is more than 1 year old

SWaP Signature watchphone

Timepiece telephony

Video playback runs to 3GP and MPEG 4. It baulked at our 8MB MPEG 4 Avatar trailer, and while it did play 0.5MB files these were pixellated beyond real recognition. We are still waiting for confirmation of an official file-size limit for video playback.

Signature SWaP

Snap unhappy: the SWaP's take on a nearby saxophone

The camera lens sits on the right side of the Signature alongside the microphone. These look like oversized control buttons and the protrusion is irritating. Still, side-mounting the lens ought to make framing shots using the screen easier than having the lens on the front would have been.

It's a good theory, but both stills and video recording are beyond a joke. Even at the highest quality setting, the results are appalling. The view on screen while you are framing a video is twisted through 90° making positioning very tricky.

You can take still shots at a range of resolutions: 80 x 60, 160 x 120, 320 x 240, 640 x 480 and 176 x 132. Working at 640 x 480 and with image quality set to high, results were again appalling. If you can make out a saxophone in the sample photo, well done.

Signature SWaP

The menu layout is typical for a phone

But you may as well not bother. Video, both on screen and during playback, is too grainy to make any sense at all, exposure control is appalling, and video is shot at a mere 138 x 108 pixels. It really isn’t worth posting a copy of the grainy, indecipherable mess that results here.

Next page: Verdict

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