Hello, and welcome to another episode of the 8-Bit Guy.
Now, I have a confession to make.
I actually receive quite a few offers from corporations, offering to send me their products
if I would just agree to do a review of the product on my YouTube channel.
Now, 99% of the time, I just turn these guys down.
I mean, I don’t want to be a corporate sell-out, right?
No, seriously, it’s really more to do with, the products are just not interesting to me.
I mean, it’s like phone accessories, and iPhone apps, and you know, stuff like that
that’s not really in line with my channel.
So, I just turn it down.
But, when Divoom emailed me and asked me if I would accept a free Timebox, well, this
looks pretty darned cool.
So, I thought I would become a sell-out and I’m going to review it for you.
So I don’t normally do unboxing videos, but the packaging on this product is so outstanding.
You’ll see what I mean shortly.
I mean, if they are going to put this much effort into the box, then I guess I’ll take
the time to show it.
At first, I couldn’t figure out how this comes apart.
And I didn’t want to cut or otherwise damage the box.
But eventually I realized the inner part just slides out, but it’s just really tight.
All right, so let’s see what we’ve got here, I’m not even sure which color they
sent me.
Oh look, it’s wood grain.
I bet Clint from Lazy Game Reviews is drooling already.
Oh, it came with silica gel.
It says not to eat it.
That’s too bad, because it looked so delicious.
So here’s the little manual.
Ehh..
I won’t bother to read this.
I only read manuals as a last resort.
So let’s peel off this little protector here.
OK, I’m going to try powering it on.
Well, the battery has at least some charge on it.
It appears to go straight to a bluetooth symbol.
So I guess I’d better get out my phone and pair it up.
OK, so now it starts displaying the time, which is not correct so I’ll have to fix
that.
So right off the bat, you can play music from your phone.
The speaker is in the back, but it actually sounds pretty good.
You can select several different animations to go along with your music.
Of course, this thing does a whole lot of other stuff too.
OK, so it appears I need to download and install this free app.
And it looks like I needed to setup an account.
So I’ll just do that right quick.
Ok, so it has detected the device, and now I’m going to connect to it with the app.
I noticed it automatically corrected the time.
Hmm.
Ok, let’s have a look at the gallery.
Oh look, they have all kinds of vintage computer icons and stuff in here.
Oh look, here’s the original Apple logo.
I wonder if they have the Commodore or Atari logo somewhere.
Oh, they have Facebook.
And Elmo.
I’m sure these little pictures are probably used for notifications and things.
I’ll have to figure that out eventually.
It looks like you can design your own.
That being the case, I’m going to draw the old Commodore logo.
There we go, that’s better.
So that’s now in my gallery of custom images.
I should mention, by the way, that you see a slight flicker on camera.
But in person you don’t see this.
I’m sure it has to do with the refresh rate of the timebox not syncing up with the camera.
I also drew the old Atari logo and the original Electronic Arts logo.
So it looks like they have some other stuff here, like these country flags, numbers and
letters, emojis, and even some animations.
Let’s see what those look like.
It looks like they are kind of slow.
They move about one frame per second.
And it appears to have some little games in here.
This one is dice, I guess if you are playing board games.
You have to shake the phone, which I guess makes it kind of pointless because if you
have to use the phone, you might as well just use a dice app on the phone.
There’s also a little driving game which is fun to play for about 30 seconds.
So, I noticed this thing has an auxiliary line input.
So I wonder what interesting things we can find to connect to that?
So, apparently you push this button once to cycle between the different audio sources.
So let’s try the speak and spell.
Of course, the speak and spell is pointless because it already has its own speaker anyway.
So this old Casio CZ-1000 makes more sense because it requires an external speaker or
headphones if you want to hear anything at all.
Of course, I’ll need one of these little converters in order to connect it to the quarter-inch
output jack.
OK, let’s pick an instrument.
You know, it actually sounds fine.
But I notice there is a very slight delay between pressing the keys and hearing the
sound.
So the timebox must be buffering or processing the sound.
This actually makes it very uncomfortable to play anything.
So I don’t think I can recommend the timebox for this purpose.
However, it probably works great with vintage audio gear like this original Diamond MP3
player, or an old Sony Discman or Walkman cassette player.
I wonder how it will work with a GameBoy Color.
The volume on these has always been severely lacking.
Actually, it sounds pretty good.
And I don’t think the delay in the sound processing is very noticeable here, so it
doesn’t interfere with the gameplay.
Of course this thing isn’t perfect.
One problem I had several times was the app would no longer sync with the device and the
only way I could solve it was by turning bluetooth off on my phone completely, and then turning
it back on and re-syncing everything.
So, I suppose you could put this on your nightstand as a regular alarm clock.
But you’d need to turn the brightness way down.
Alternatively, you could put it on a shelf somewhere as a decorative thing, which is
what I’m doing with mine.
So, some other things you can do with this thing.
It has a scoreboard.
So I guess if you had some kind of games or something going on, you could keep score in
a more public, visible way.
Also you can create a voice memo like this.
Hey, remember to feed the cat!
So when you or somebody else walks into the room, they’ll see the notice on the screen
and can press the play button to listen.
Hey, remember to feed the cat!
Alright, so it also has an FM radio built in.
But the first thing you’ll want to do is have it scan for radio channels.
It will take a moment to find them all.
Then you can select a few favorites.
You can also change channels using the built in controls on the top.
Alright, so what do I think about the Timebox?
Well, I wish I had some great, fantastic use that I could tell you.
Some purpose in life that it serves.
It really doesn’t.
It’s more like a tech-toy or gadget.
Or really, it’s more like a piece of artwork to leave around your house.
I mean, I can’t think of any really useful thing to do with it, but I still think it’s
cool.
Something doesn’t have always necessarily have to have a use in order to be cool.
I mean, a lot of the things that I collect don’t really have that much use.
But anyway, I’m not going to be doing a whole lot of commercial product reviews.
Really, this is the only, well I take that back.
I have one other one that I agreed to do that you’ll probably be seeing in a few months.
But, you won’t be seeing a lot of it, so I hope nobody gets upset that my channel’s
becoming too commercialized, because that’s certainly not the intent.
It just so happened that I finally saw a product that looked interesting enough, and you know
I think it kind of fits with the theme here, so anyway.
Also, if you’re interested in buying one, I did put a link down in the description for
your convenience, and otherwise, stick around because I have a lot more traditional content
coming your way!