NHJ VTV-201 TV watch

A wrist-watch. See what we did there?

Back in 1982, Seiko released the first TV watch. It connected to a pack the size of a cassette Walkman that took care of the TV tuning and supplied the power, but for the time it was so outrageously cool that it even made it into the James Bond movie Octopussy.

As you'd expect, things have moved on somewhat in the intervening years and this latest model from NHJ doesn't need any external pack, as everything needed to receive television programmes is crammed into the watch itself.

To start watching telly you first need to plug in the headphone lead that doubles as the aerial. It's then simply a matter of pressing the up or down buttons to tune into different stations. If you hold down either of these buttons, the TV will automatically scan to the next station, but there's no way to store presets and rather annoyingly you get a loud burst of noise when the unit is tuning between channels.

Its battery life, at just one hour, is also very short, but there is an external pack that takes four AA batteries which will power the telly a further three hours.

The biggest issue, however, was the reception. We tried it around East London and it struggled to show decent-quality TV pictures. Out of the five channels available, two tuned with acceptable, but definitely not pin-sharp, picture quality, and three were too fuzzy to watch.

So while this TV watch has an odd nostalgic quality to it, it's not the most practical way to watch telly - meaning it's much more of a novelty than a must-have gadget.