Despite all the James Bond-style excitement of a watch phone, we were a bit disappointed by the first watch phone that fell into our hands, the LG GD910. We thought we would feel like super spies but in the event just felt a bit stupid talking to our wrists. So we were a little wary of the sWaP Active Watch Phone when it appeared in the office.

Style and handling on the sWaP Active Watch Phone

As its name and appearance suggest, the sWaP Active is very much aimed at sporty types. It’s bigger than your average watch but has rubber straps and backing and a water-resistant back panel that worked well enough when we splashed it – but we didn’t risk submerging the thing and it didn’t feel the most secure. If you can’t be out of touch even on the treadmill or a long jog, then a phone that straps to your wrist could be a good idea.

Touch-screen on the sWaP Active Watch Phone

There are two buttons on the left side of the watch/phone, for on/off/exit and menu/select, but other than that all the operation of the sWaP Active is done on the touch-screen. The clockface is bigger than you would have on a normal watch, but much smaller than a phone, and too small to allow you to use your fingers. Because of this, there’s a tiny stylus in the starp. But even with this, the icons are fiddly, and staying in touch on the go is not made easy when you have to remove the stylus and muck around just to dial a friend.

You even get a full QWERTY keyboard which is also teeny, and even standing still with the stylus you’ll be making typing errors all over the place. There is handwriting recognition functionality but there you have to enter one letter at a time and pause while the device recognises it, so this is a very slow method of typing indeed and all but useless.

Call quality isn’t bad at all, surprisingly. We tested it on a busy street and the person we were calling could hear us clearly, despite the fact the phone was at our ear. If talking to your hand doesn’t appeal to you, hats off to sWaP for including a stylish Bluetooth headset, which made making and receiving calls far easier. There’s also a handsfree kit that plugs into the device’s USB port and lets you listen to any music you have saved on your 2GB microSD card, which is also bundled in. Of course, this means you’ll have a wire running from your wrist to your ears, which looks daft and means you can’t stretch at all.

Feature set on the sWaP Active Watch Phone

Surprisingly for such a small device, the sWaP Active includes music, a camera, FM radio and an internet browser. Unsurprisingly, none of the features work particularly well. The camera is on the right hand side of the device so shots were often blocked by the back of our hand, meaning that to take a picture we had to take the watch off and point it at our subject. Picture quality was average at best.

The FM radio gets a pretty good radio reception but static and volumewould suddenly shoot up when we moved out hand.

And while being able to browse the web on your watch is a brilliant concept, the small screen means lots of scrolling is required, and pages were slow to load with occasional crashing too.

The verdict on the sWaP Active Watch Phone

We think this would have worked better is sWaP had concentrated on making a watch which just does the basic phone functions like calls and text. Call quality is good, but the tiny screen is hard to navigate, typing is slow and frustrating, and the features come up short. James Bond is unlikely to be impressed.