Casio WMP-1V MP3 Audio Wrist Watch Review

Author: Anthony Roberts
Editor: Howard Ha
Publish Date: Thursday, September 7th, 2000
Originally Published on Neoseeker (http://www.neoseeker.com)
Article Link: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/casio_wmp1v/
Copyright Neo Era Media, Inc. - please do not redistribute or use for commercial purposes.

Introduction

The WMP-1V in the Box

No one can deny that unique and bizarre gadgets will always draw the attention, scrutiny, praise, and criticism of others, and in coming up with the MP3 Audio Wrist Watch, Casio must have had that single thought in mind. Indeed this “MP3 portable” player looks, feels, and functions just like any wrist watch, but I wouldn’t really term it either a watch or an MP3 player, being that it sort of straddles the middle line between being a proper portable player and a regular watch.

Don’t make any mistake; Casio went to great lengths when designing this gadget. It’s chock full of features that are baffling considering the packing and the weight of the final product. The player weighs around 70g(less than 2 ounces), and once strapped on feels no heavier than a standard watch. If it weren’t for its sheer size, I would wager that you wouldn’t even notice the added bulk of the electronics, memory, and battery that must be housed in this gadget.

All the components in the kit

The WMP-1V isn’t exactly a high-end timepiece, though it does have all the basic functions you would expect from a sporty stopwatch. That’s not the point of the whole product though, since the minute anyone notices the thing, they are bound to start staring – and notice they will. This thing is easily 3-4 times the size of a regular watch and I could not help but wonder how stupid one would look when spotted with such a beast stuck to one’s wrist. So I coerced a co-worker to play the guinea pig and walk around while showing his new toy off to any who would see. To our surprise, the watch didn’t draw as much attention as we would have thought.

The buttons on the player take a little getting used to. They’re small, rubbery, and not the most responsive buttons on the planet. I had little enough problem getting them to do what I want, and found them to be reliable and fit for their job, but everyone I asked thought the buttons were not very user friendly. I had no problems with them though, and was happy to find that the fast-forward and rewind buttons also allow you to scan through songs. I was less impressed with the mode button, which you will have to play with A LOT to do certain things. The player allows you to switch between play modes – a total of 4 including the standard shuffle and repeat modes, along with an A-B repeat mode that Casio calls “Part Repeat”. The problem is that to get to the EQ settings of the player, you’re stuck with having to press through all the play modes before finally reaching the EQ settings. That’s not the most convenient setup, but I guess the limited number of buttons restricts the possibilities.

Display & Transfer

Watch on the wrist

Speaking of the EQ settings… I was surprised that the player even came with any EQ settings at all. The EQ “settings” turned out to be a limited set of preset changes that either boost the bass or treble, with no real ability to adjust different frequency bands. Still, these EQ changes were effective and I found myself boosting the bass to better smoothen the response curve of music.

The LCD display of the unit is pitifully small, but I doubt they could have mustered any more screen real estate out of the watch, which was already big enough. The screen is “backlit” by a small orangish light from out of one corner. In MP3 mode the watch displays the track number, elapsed time, and play mode (shuffle, repeat, etc). The bottom half of the window can display little animated icons during playback of music, or it can display the track title. The animated icons are mediocre at best, and I couldn’t even tell half the time what they were supposed to be. Casio even went to the trouble of including a software utility that lets you design and animate your own little icons, which can then be uploaded to the player. I wondered whether such a utility would ever see any use. The track title that is “displayed” by the LCD is painfully done so letter by letter. That’s right… it actually flashes each letter in sequence and its up to you to decipher what the heck is going on. I’m not sure who decided it would be cool to flash the titles like that, but it certainly turned out to be a pain, and it was apparent that no one would get any use out of this display feature. That’s a lot of screen space wasted, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they could have at least scrolled the title across that lower half, maybe 5 or so characters at a time. It just seems weird to try and force so much screen information in so small a space.

USB Transfer & Charge Cradle

The player comes with an interface “cradle” that serves as both a charger and connection platform between the player and the computer. To keep the player more compact, the interface connections are located on this cradle, and the player jacks in using an interesting shuttle design. I was glad to find that the cradle used a USB connector rather than the more dated parallel interface, but I found that music transfers were sluggish and were NOT as fast as all the other USB based MP3 portables I’ve encountered before. So I set out to do some transfer timing tests, and was surprised to find that it took nearly 12 minutes to fill the player’s memory capacity to max. That works out to be around 40-45Kb/sec, which is basically the same speed as a parallel port interface, and sort of defeats the purpose of using USB at all for the transfer, unless the cradle also uses the USB port to draw power so that the player doesn’t get drained during music transfer.

Watch connected to the cradle

Music transfers are performed via a custom made program that lets you set up playlists for one time download of all the files you want. The program looked pretty cheesy, but it did have the capability to display useful extra information from files as you browse your drive, and I was pleased that you could transfer multiple files at a time, especially because of the slow transfer times of the cradle.

Battery Life & Storage

Watch spread out with earbuds

When I first saw the player, one of the main concerns that popped up was the battery life. I wasn’t sure whether something so small would have a satisfactory battery life, and indeed, the player is capable of cranking out the tunes for only 4 hours on a full charge. No doubt that is an impressive feat from the watch, but as far as portable players go, that type of battery life is reminiscent of days when old and power hungry tape players were your only choice in portable music. The good news is that this 4 hour play time does not immediately affect the time keeping capabilities of the player. Once you drain the player to a certain level, it will continue to function as a normal watch, and all MP3 playback becomes impossible. I was glad that Casio didn’t let the watch/player drain itself of all battery power, which would have been ridiculously annoying.

As if the short play time weren’t enough of a negative, I was also amazed that the watch needed nearly 4 hours in order to fully charge the built-in battery – this was ridiculously high compared to other rechargeable batteries that can typically be fully charged in 1-2 hours time. Because of the combination of low battery life and long recharge times, I was wondering whether the watch would serve a very limited purpose. I am a stickler when it comes to charging things. My cell phone has a 12 day standby and I always find myself out of batteries when I need it most. So I think I would be very hard put to keep up with the “maintenance” demands of this player.

Closeup of face & earbuds

Another thing that concerned me, as a first impression, was the memory capacity of the watch. I was skeptical it could have much built-in memory at all, and it turns out the player comes in two models, one with 16MB of memory, and the other with 32MB of memory. 32MB of storage was a standard in MP3 portable players not too long ago, but now it seems a painful restriction, since only around 33minutes, or 5 songs recorded at 128Kbps could fit into such a space. The watch doesn’t have any expansion options either (in fact, it wouldn’t have been feasible to use SmartMedia cards for sure, since the player isn’t long enough to fit any), so whatever you first get is what you’re stuck with. What gave me comfort was the idea that I wouldn’t treat this watch like any old player. I basically saw the watch as an exercise companion, and I am certain that in those cases even 33 minutes of music can be quite sufficient.

In spite of all these quirks, I was eager to test out the actual music quality of the player, and I wasn’t disappointed at all by what I heard. The sound that came from this clunky wannabe watch is clear, vibrant and possibly better than a good handful of similar products. The sound was surprisingly clean, in spite of the low 70dB minimum Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) listed in the manual’s specs. I was pleasantly treated to mild, but passable bass, and a pretty detailed upper end. There was no doubt to me that the watch would satisfy the casual listeners, and would carve itself out a place amongst the sporty types who might pick this gadget over their tape or CD players. It certainly is easier to go jogging with the WMP-1V strapped to a wrist, rather than having a larger player bouncing in a pocket or threatening to pop off your shorts regardless of belt clips and straps. I wouldn’t bet on impressing chicks with this thing though, and you’re better off realizing straight off the bat that other, more sophisticated players out there will likely win you more attention and fame.

Audio Quality & Final Thoughts

The earbuds that come with the Casio don’t look very exciting, but their audio output quality belied the plain looking design. When I took the earbuds and tested them separate from the player, I was treated to relatively detailed music with passable bass reproduction. When pushed, the earbuds really took well to added bass, and managed to keep a smooth and deep response to most material. My test player could crank out more bass than the Casio, so I knew the earbuds certainly had good potential. Some instruments didn’t sound quite right, and the earbuds didn’t have a completely transparent and clear soundstage – I’ve heard some earbuds with amazing stereo separation, and while these earbuds had good upper frequency reproduction, they lacked that extra crispness and detail that I have heard in the past. Overall though, these are some of the better sounding “stock” earbuds that I’ve come across, and paired with the Casio Wrist Audio player, the sound was very satisfactory, with a nice baselines, nice highs, and good vocal reproduction.

Watch & buds just chillin'

Several things are worth bringing to your attention, with regards to some things I’ve noticed about the player. The first is an audible click when changing tracks. This is not by design, unlike audible bleeps that signal track changes, but is instead some sort of bug in the software decoding or interface. Another quirk of the watch is that it is incapable of playback of songs encoded with greater than 128Kbps bit rate. Although this latter quirk is frustrating, it shouldn’t pose too much a problem, since the 32MB (and 16MB) RAM capacity of the player doesn’t really encourage the use of higher bit rate MP3’s. It was frustrating for me because I had a number of favourite tracks that I keep in higher quality files - I had to re-rip and re-encode each of them in order to have them transfer to the watch.

All the quirks aside, the watch is an interesting step in the right direction. As technology improves, I imagine that future iterations of the Audio Wrist Watch will become increasingly appealing to a crowd of tech savvy consumers. Right now, I think the watch is more of a tech bauble - a toy if you will. And at a suggested retail price of $249US, I think it costs a little too much for what you get. Certainly the full size players we’ve seen in the past few weeks are a more appropriate investment for portable digital music. Although if you are an avid jogger or bicyclist, I can imagine that the watch’s combination of good audio quality and rugged portability could be a great boon. In the end, this is a very specialized product, and its price, limited storage capacity, and short battery life are all very strong considerations that would suggest you look elsewhere.

Overall Score: 75%

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