Review: Aigo F029 multimedia player

In the technology and gadget industry, direct imports from the Far East aren’t always success stories in the UK, and Aigo’s rather peculiar F029 digital watch appears to have all the ingredients to follow this trend.

The Aigo F029 is a fully-featured multimedia player, including a photo viewer, mp3 player, video player, e-book reader and voice recorder.

It’s also worth mentioning that you can configure the screensaver to show the time, and if you disable the ‘auto off’ function it behaves as a proper watch when idle; considering it is a watch, these features are pretty handy. Of course you’ll have to remember to charge it each night, so it’s not something you’d want to rely on to get you to important meetings on time.

Despite first impressions that mainly consisted of ‘Kinder Egg toy’ and ‘something Mickey Mouse would wear’, when you get the F029 up and running you actually can’t help but like it. There are a few designs to choose from, all of which use a jelly rubber strap and a surprisingly comfortable and very secure fastener. It’s also pretty slimline, so won't draw too much attention.

Sound quality is reasonable through the supplied headphones that plug into the side of the device. You’re given a handful of basic options for adjusting audio, including graphic equaliser presets, but we were left frustrated that the sound cuts off if you navigate back to the main menu to read an e-book.

As we expected, the rest of the features are fairly basic. The video format support is somewhat lacking and it wasn't clear whether this was a codec or a screen resolution issue; the Chinese software and manuals supplied weren’t eager to help.

You’re not provided with any conversion software to get correctly formatted files onto the watch either. If you’re savvy enough you can work out how to encode video to the 160x128 resolution of the display without too much trouble, and with storage capacities up to just 1GB you’ll need to save as much space as possible.

The quality of the display is excellent, especially when viewing photos, but we doubt many people will be happy to stare at their wrist to watch a film on the 1.3in screen.

In truth, the F029 is an mp3 player of reasonable quality considering the size, but the other features hold more of a gimmick appeal than any true potential. Having said that we were surprised at how comfortable it was to wear along with the fact that it’s reasonably unassuming considering its features.

Despite what your first impressions are likely to be, there probably is a target audience for this device in the UK, albeit a niche one. It would be ideal for jogging or exercise use and with a well designed control layout it’s pretty easy to navigate the menus on the move.

We doubt it will have mass appeal, but in terms of fulfilling a brief the F029 is a likeable product that left us pleasantly surprised.

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