Swap Rebel: combined watch and phone

The Swap Rebel is a watch combined with a mobile phone (Swap stands for ‘Smart Watch and Phone).

It may sound like the sort of thing Dick Tracy would use but it has a number of benefits over a standard mobile.

For example, it is always conveniently located on your wrist and also cannot be dropped or left behind easily. However, having a phone attached to your wrist also has its drawbacks: unless the supplied wired earphones are plugged in, the speaker phone must be used so you'll interest (or annoy) passers-by with your conversations.

The earphones can be used to make and receive calls, but it quickly became irritating to have them constantly connected because of how much they restricted our hand movement. A wireless Bluetooth headset would have been better.

During use, the Rebel struggled to hold a signal in places where a standard phone fared better. We were similarly unimpressed with the volume level of the speakerphone which could only be heard in a very quiet environment.

The Rebel is moulded from soft rubber so it's water-resistant but comfortable. It will play MP3 music and some video as well as tuning into FM radio stations. There's also a low-resolution camera and it can be used to browse the web, though as you can imagine it's limited greatly by the tiny screen, and it only works on the far-outdated WAP standard, making the internet side largely useless.

The Rebel has a 1.5in touch-sensitive screen and the small text used in its menus was difficult to read. It was too easy to make mistakes when writing text messages, even when using the stylus, which is cleverly stowed away in the strap. Using a finger to navigate the menus and options presented another challenge and we kept hitting the wrong items. It didn't help that the Rebel's menus were not particularly user friendly. For example, sending a text message involves opening a not especially obvious sub-menu.

The Rebel is an innovative product, but the watch-phone idea has been tried before and it's never worked – unfortunately Swap hasn't managed it with the Rebel either.

The Swap Rebel is available from Amazon