Cect M800 Unlocked GSM Tri Band Phone Watch 900/1800/1900 . ~$150 street price. Ok so I was looking for another PDA watch to get. First one that came to mind was the wrist PDA that fossil put out a while back and tracking down a used one. The wrist PDA was nice, only it was costly (over $300) and had an extremely short battery life. So I widened my search to include those MP4 video player watches, then I stumbled onto the arena of “Cell Phone Watches”. These watches were MP3 / 4 / H264 / video / wav players, full PDA’s with calendar, alarms, contacts, computer sync, AND ALSO you could make PHONE CALLS ?!?!?  from a WATCH !?!? and they were priced at only $150 ? (all things considered that seemed kinda cheap). At first it did seem too good to be true. Do these things really work ? How is the cell reception ? Battery life ? How do you talk to it? How’s the voice quality ? and on and on. Then I looked at the price… around $150 around the web (ebay, china direct places, etc). For that price, I was willing to take the chance to see if or how well this watch worked here in Southern California (USA) as a phone watch. First some notes about cell phone bands: This watch is a “tri band” watch, which means it supports three different bands of radio transmissions. The two particular bands we are interested in, here in the USA, are the 850 and 1900 bands. Both these bands are covered by T-mobile and AT&T cellular services (and a few others) here in the states. You may have noticed however that this watch is 900/1800/1900 band, this means that this watch will only work where you get 1900 band coverage. Lucklily for me, most metropolitan areas here in the US are totally covered by 1900 band. However there may be some spots in your area here and there that may not covered or the signal is not that strong, where cellular providers have blanketed those same areas with the 850 band coverage to improve signal strength or have any signal at all on your phone. a decent tri band watch for the US market would be a 850/1800/1900 for example or just go quad band in the future (look for that). That being said, it would be great if this watch was “quad band” that included 850/900/1800/1900 bands. Then you are covered totally and completely around the world. As it stands the Cect M800 works “excellent” overseas and “almost excellent” here in the US according to total cell coverage (all bands). It’s a bummer it lacks the 850 band, but like I mentioned, the watch will STILL WORKS pretty damn good in almost all the areas any other phone would work. To see coverage maps of different bands and service providers check here: http://www.gsmworld.com The link above shows the GSM coverage for AT&T it shows their 850/1900 and 3G coverage areas. More on a 3G side note below. So far it has worked perfectly in all the places I travel near my house. You need to look for 1900 band coverage for this watch. Ok now that we got the cell phone jargon out of the way we can get back to the watch features. What this watch is in a few words is a Nokia 3650 shrunk down on your wrist but with a touch screen, more memory and sans camera (they have other watches with cameras however). So take your most pimp cell phone from the 1999′-2000′ era and put it into a watch form factor and you have the Cect M800. Cect also has an M810, a Cect V2, and their first models the M500 and M300 series among others. With all the excitement of the Apple iPhone, I think much of the bang and publicity has been sucked away from these watch phone devices which hit the market at about the same time almost a year ago. Calculator on the phonewatch. Touch screen interface with mini-stylus that stores in watch band. After almost a week of using the watch phone I’m truly amazed at how well it works. The touch screen interface is great, this makes using the calculator and dialing numbers or even text messaging very easy. Note that the phone dialer app (not shown) brings up larger on screen keys so you can use your finger and don’t have to use the included stylus that stows away in the watch band. You can key text in with an on-screen keyboard and dig this it even has HANDWRITING RECOGNITION ! built in so you can use that to draw characters (one by one) if you prefer. You also get a lot of stuff for the watch included in the box. You get the watch, two 550mah Li-on batteries, Bluetooth headset, USB charging cables for watch and headset, user manual… and unfortunately an un-unable overseas AC adapter.. haha.. but this is no worry, you can plug into any USB charging device including your laptop to re-charge stuff. I purchased this watch from Ebay and the seller included a free CAR charger as well. What was not in the box was phone drivers and software, for this you are on your own, I can give you the name to search for it’s called Cect Phonesuite software. It’s on the web here and there, I’m not sure if it can be re-disributed or what but it allows you to connect your watch to your computer (windows PC) and change all your PDA settings (which is GREAT if you use the watch as a PDA)… or you can connect the watch to ANY computer as a USB mass storage device for transferring files to and from it (videos, audio, music) the phone also has a voice recorder and can record phone calls you can transfer these over to your computer for example easily. It can record in AAC or even direct to wav format which is nice. Battery life is rated at 140 – 200 hours of standby (that’s like 1 week or so) and talk time is at 180 – 200 minutes. So far that seems to be holding true according to my battery meter.  You do have two batteries included as well which is great. The one side of the watch has talk and end buttons with what appears like a USB port in the middle. It is a USB connection, BUT the cable is proprietary so DON’T LOSE the cable, this is another bummer I wish they had used standard mini USB vs their own cable, but oh well. The other side of the watch has scroll up and down buttons and an enter / ok button. I could not capture all the menus, but there are many. You have many options and features in the watch in regards to phone operation. It all branches off from a main menu page that has icons. After that you have sub-menus, etc. The watch has some games, full graphic calendar, tap a day and set an appointment, several alarms, basically full PDA type features. the Video player and audio player are great add ons. The phone is also capable of WAP and GPRS access for tiny format web browsing right on the watch. One thing that is missing (for me personally) is a countdown timer, which is a bummer, I use timers a lot. The work around is setting an alarm (since you can set however many you need) but a simple timer app would have been great (or can possibly be added via 3rd party ?) dunno. This is more a “watch” feature.. anyway… The watch showed up as having 512 megs of ram when I attached it to my computer (despite the specs saying 128megs of ram) which is not much and there is no card slot on this particular model watch either. It’s enough for tons of data and a few songs and ringtones. In terms of the watch size, here it is next to a Casio Pathfinder 1200. It’s about the same size !!! for a CELL PHONE on your wrist ! It’s about the same thickness as well. Amazing that a mini PDA / cell phone has now been shrunk down to this size, and the nice part is it only costs $150. Of course I would have liked some better styling cues on the watch, but I’ll take it for that price anyway. The watch is also lightweight. In fact it weighs less than the Casio watch in the pic above battery and all. What About Cell Phone Service ? For cell phone service I purchased a Gophone and simply transffered the  SIM card over to my watch phone. AT&T now has 3G capable SIM cards in their Gophone pay as you go phones which are only $14 at most stores. Great for this watch or if you have a 3G internet tablet, $20 a month gives you unlimited data to your laptop card or Sony UX but thats another article… If you think you may want unlimited 3G data on a pay as you go (no contract) for only $20 / mo on another device in the future, then AT&T is nice. (this watch does not support 3G only WAP and GPRS). If you on the other hand are only going to talk on the watch and talk often, then T-mobile may offer better deals / rates for pre-paid plans. Activate your Gophone with $25 – $100 and take all year to use your minutes (for the $100 plan). Phone calls are .25 cents per minute, but hey, this is more a backup phone / second line for me. Even better is if you are already on AT&T or T-Mobile… then you can just transfer your SIM card over and use the watch whenever you want or need that form factor. I went with a HAL digital face for now. Yes you can change the watch face to a digital watch or any wallpaper you want. You can also display your phone number (toggle) on the watch face if you want. After a few moments (programmable) the watch face turns off like any cell phone does to save battery. You can then tap the screen to get it to display again or press a button. There are some parts of the watches interface where you can not change the background and may be forced to look at a cute pink background with snowflakes, etc. another oh well.. 🙂 The speakerphone on this watch is awesome, it’s better / louder than the iPhone, mogul’s and most other PDA phones. Music playback and video sound are also surprisingly loud for the small size watch. In addition to speakerphone operation, the other choice is to hold the watch up to your ear and talk that way (for more privacy) or use the included bluetooth headset which sounds great. I have not tested the phone in a crowded area where there is tons of noise so I don’t know if there is noise cancellation features, but there I’m assuming it works like most any other phone. Most every other phone feature is there, custom rings, wav files for ring tones, midi ring tones, photo ID for callers in contacts, all your providers feaures (fwd, transfer, 3 way), etc. The watch does not have a vibration feature (or I can’t seem to find it), which is a bummer, but battery life has been very good, again similar to a regular cell phone s far 3 days and still half the battery is left. Bottom line… I would like to have vibration alerts and a countdown timer, that’s about the only negatives, mabye more memory but no big deal for me. Everything else about the watch rocks. A few years back I could see this device selling for $600 easily. It does work great here in Southern California (orange county area) and I plan to use it as a geek piece and as an extra phone when needed. 🙂 It’s great for jogging, biking, no huge phone bouncing around in your pocket, or outdoor sporting, it’s NOT waterproof, but it’s built pretty well. AND… this is not gonna be my last Phone Watch.. hehe… Description *LCD: 1.3 inch TFT260k Pixels, Resolution：128 x 160px Touch Screen. *RING TONE: 64 Polyphonic, Support format：MP3ã€?MIDIã€?WAVã€?Incoming Ring Tone, Incoming Photo, incoming movie *Handwriting .pen calibration. * Languages: english, spanish, italian, turkish, russian, arabic, chinese, Vietnamese * Music format : MP3 , Mp4 wallpaper Full screen * Wallpaper :JPG,GIF * Phonebook: 500 groups * MMS supported * SMS supported * switch on -off ,user defined. * MP3 Alarm * Game : Intelligent puzzle * Memory:TF 128 MB (mine showed 512MB when I hooked it up) * Talk time :100-180 minutes * Standby time:140-200 Hours * Other features :MP3/4, Hands free (Bluetooth),Group messaging, Voice recording, MMS, SMS, 64 polyphonic ring tones,world clock health manager, currency converter, more ….. Accessories * one wall charger * one Bluetooth cable, * one bluetoth headset * one USB cable * stylus contained in wristband * English user manual. * Car Charger