For Sale: 2 video watches

[editor]

I'm offering this for sale here for a week, and if there are no takers, I'll post it on eBay.

This is a pair of Aigo brand MP4 player watches. Most Americans aren't familiar with MP4 players -- they're tiny MP3 players sold in China and several of the less-developed Asian nations. The reason they're called "MP4" is because in addition to music, they also play video. The little critters are extremely popular in China since it wasn't until recently that iPods became available, and they're still not ubiquitous. These I bought in the Suntec City mall in Singapore.

In the picture above, my watch (the black one on the left) is playing the James Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service. My wife's watch (the white one on the right) is playing a JPEG slideshow.

In addition to pictures and videos, the watches actually tell the time with a digital display in the center of an analog display that changes color every minute.

The watches are -- 1.6 inches wide, 1.5 inches tall, and .5 inches deep. It has 512 megs of storage.

Along the top is a sub-micro USB port and a charging light.

On the right are the buttons: Back, Play/Pause, and Forward.

On the bottom is a microphone.

On the left side is a standard headphone jack, a mode button, a + button and a - button.

MP4 players usually have a lot more features than the average American MP3 player. This one's main menu has:

• Music (for listening to MP3s)
  
• Voice (for recording from the built-in microphone)
  
• Video (for playing back videos)
  
• Photo (for the JPEG slideshow)
  
• EBook (for reading text files)
  
• System
  

The screen is a very bright and crisp full-color 160x128 OLED display measuring .8 inches by .6 inches. It comes with a USB cable that also charges it.

A few tips: To turn it on or off, hold down the Play button. Navigate the menus with the right and left arrow buttons. Select with the Mode button.

To get music, video, text, or image files onto the player, just plug it into your computer (it shows up like a regular USB drive) and drag the files on.

Note that although Chinese MP4 players play standard music MP3's just fine, they do not play back the sort of American MP4 video files that you would get from Quicktime or Windows Media. They have their own codec and require their own programs to convert video files into a format that the MP4 player can display. A copy of the video converter software is on the watches -- you just have to copy it to your computer. There's also an English PDF manual on the watches.

That's the big reason I'm no longer interested in this gadget. I mostly used it for the radio feature because I have a Mac, and the software to convert the videos only works under Windows. I did a couple of movies using Virtual PC on my Mac, but it was a nuisance that way.

Because of the size of my wrist, I had to drill two extra holes into the band of the black one. They're not really noticeable.

The watches were $90 each when we bought them last year. Now I'm asking $60 for the pair, plus $5 shipping.