If you're going to carry a media player, how best to keep your pocket from being picked? Strap it to your wrist, of course, which is exactly what you do with the Video Watch. This device does video, music, photos, text, voice recordings and, in its spare time, shows the time in analogue and digital formats.

All these functions have been available for a while in pocket players, of course, but this is one of the first designs to mount the player on your wrist and not make an unsightly bulge in your shirt/blouse cuff. It's actually not much bulkier than a typical Casio G-Shock (rugged man's watch) and is a lot more useful, if you don't need to know your blood pressure or mean height above sea level.

The Video Watch has a bright, 128 x 128-pixel OLED colour display, which is a lot better than LCD at showing videos in outdoor light and has no problem with fast frame updates. The menu system is controlled via three buttons down each vertical side of the watch and is pretty easy to familiarise yourself with. When held down, one of the buttons goes straight to time display; a useful shortcut.

You should be able to watch four hours of video or listen to eight hours of audio playback from a single battery charge, and you can charge up via the supplied USB cable or with the mains power supply, also in the box. The USB link is used for data transfer too, of course, and once you've connected the watch, Windows XP and Vista see it as an ordinary external drive. Drag and drop files in appropriate formats into the sensibly-named folders on the watch and away you go.

By appropriate formats, we mean MP3, WMA and MP4 for audio and the proprietary SigmaTel Motion Video (SMV) format for video, which has the advantage of offering an hour's playback in just 200MB of the watch's 2GB of memory. You may not have come across SMV format before, but a converter is supplied so you can transfer video from the more common AVI, MPEG and WMV formats.

We are generally very impressed by the Video Watch, but do wonder just how robust its plastic case and display screen will be when strapped to your wrist. We'd like to see a version with a metal case and strap and, ideally, a mineral glass face.

The video watch had to come, and it has to be said that this attempt is pretty good. It's easy to use, has reasonable playback life and comes with a decent little earbud headset, so you don't look a complete nerd with your watch to your ear. For the functionality, convenience and anti-Artful Dodger security, it's good value, too.