O2 Joggler

The O2 Joggler is supposed to be a straightforward way for busy families to share information about appointments and events. It doesn’t require an O2 subscription to use.

The heart of this multimedia device is its calendar function, but it’s a bit of a letdown as it’s locked to O2’s calendar. If you use Outlook or another calendar, you won’t be able to sync them.

Individual calendars can be set up for family members and you can easily toggle between them. A nice touch for O2 mobile customers is that you can set up free text alerts as appointment reminders. A less appealing aspect of the Joggler is that it doesn’t flag impending appointments on the screen.

The Joggler also offers live features such as traffic information from Trafficmaster, news and weather reports, which are strangely addictive, and O2 is promising more in the future. Internet radio is something to look forward to, but absent for now.

There are some niggles with the device; it tended to crash on us occasionally and it seems O2 has bundled too much spurious functionality. While letting it double as a digital picture frame is admittedly a nice touch, is it necessary to use the Joggler to stream music or videos from a PC? Other devices manage this better, and the addition of games is overkill.

The hardware is of a high standard though, and the 7in touchscreen is superb – bright and wonderfully responsive. It is simple to set up; if you don’t have Wifi then you can also connect an Ethernet cable at the back, which is joined by a headphone and power jack, with a USB connector at the side.

The Joggler is more versatile than a fridge door full of scribbled notes and we like the idea; but O2 still has some work to do on making this device an indispensable household item.