The Good:
The smallest TV available.The Bad:
Lasts just over an hour per charge.The Verdict:
TV portability to the very max.
REVIEW:
For years, my car's been equipped with a portable Casio colour TV for whenever I find myself sitting in the parking lot waiting for someone. A little smaller than a paperback, it fits into the armrest compartment on my VW Golf. Compared to the Buick-like size of my old B/W portable beast, my "armrest TV", is a Mini Cooper.
Up against the VTV-101 from NHJ, though, it might as well be a nicely painted brick.
The updated version of the TV Watch, shipped over for review by Dynamism, is a colour television the size of a Zippo lighter.
You might recall the original TV watch from Seiko back in the early 1980s. A cool idea, yes. But the separate component system made the watch horribly impractical, and the idea suffered a quick and rightful death. So painful was its demise, in fact, that it took more than 20 years for manufcaturers to work up the courage to give it another go.
Why now? Because the fine folks over at Sony managed to cram a VHF/UHF tuner into something the size of a Lego block. Sure enough, it wasn't long before that technology started to work its way into mobile devices and the VTV-101 was born.
The 101 is billed as a "TV watch." Wisely, the watch portion consists of a velcro wrist strap with a plastic housing you can snap the TV into. I say "wisely" because you will probably never wear it that way.
Sacrificing my public image in the name of science, I wore it as a watch for about an hour at the local mall. If you're into female repellant, wearing it this way will give you better results than a wet spot on the front of your pants.
I ditched the wrist strap and chucked the unit into a pocket. That worked well, but put some light scratches on the screen. So I opted instead for the lanyard and wore the 55 gram unit inside my shirt when not in use. Separated from the watch strap, the little 45.7mm (wide) by 49.4mm (high) by 18.2mm (deep) powerhouse is actually pretty cool and functional. You will be mesmerized turning the dollhouse sized TV around in your hand. It definitely has that "I-didn't-know-they-could-do-that" kind of feel to it.
Each person I showed it to simply marveled at the VTV-101. After wowing my senior-citizen neighbours, I shoved the earbuds into a pocket and made my way downtown.
The simple set of four buttons on the TV is really straightforward to use, and includes a scan function to find local stations in a snap. The included earbuds have a proprietary plug which allows them to double as the antenna. No matter where I went, the earbuds had to be connected in order to get a channel. It's not much of an issue, since there are no external speakers anyway. The tuner is set up for NTSC channels from one to 62 and spins through them quickly while scanning.
With both devices in hand, I scanned for a well known local news station. Both TVs locked onto the channel almost instantly. The main difference between the two was the sensitivity of the earbud cable as an antenna. I had to take considerably more care in the positioning of the cable in order to get a clear picture. The bigger Casio also fared better at locking onto some of the weaker channels. Once locked in, though, the 280-by-220 pixel, 1.5 inch (diagonal) TFT screen on the 101 does a respectable job.
Back at home, I snapped the unit into its charging stand and plugged it in. The manufacturer advises that it will take 90 minutes to charge and should last for an hour. My own test showed it lasting for one hour and 13 minutes from full charge to blackout. That's not a long time, so you may want to be picky about what you watch. If you do happen to run dry while out and about, the charging stand has room for 4 AA batteries and doubles as a battery pack.
Looking back on my day with the device, I'm still pretty impressed. This puppy is small enough to actually make it practical to carry a TV everywhere you go. So if you're a news/sports junkie and have about $230 (U.S.) to spend, you just can't get any more portable than this.
