I Turned My Apple Watch into a Gaming Handheld
An old Apple Watch gathering dust in a drawer, a £60 aluminium case and a clickwheel. Is this the most charming little handheld of the year?
An iPod Built Around Your Old Apple Watch
The RePod C1 is an aluminium Apple Watch case that turns your old watch into an iPod. But, I think it’s much cooler as a retro gaming handheld. It’s really well built, with high-quality materials that match all of your silver Apple products, and it’s only available for the Series 4 through 9 as well as the SE. Once you’ve popped your watch in and adjusted a couple of settings, it’s time to start digging for the apps that bring the whole thing to life.
Arcadia, and a Scroll Wheel with 72 Clicks
It turns out there are some really cool retro gaming apps made for the Apple Watch, and my favourite is Arcadia, a collection of arcade-style games. Most of them are controlled with the Digital Crown, which the RePod replicates with its scroll wheel. The wheel has 72 clicks of precision, and you’ll need every one of them, because some of these games are properly challenging. You can dodge cars in a classic racing game, go bowling or play Pong, and there’s even a version of Snake that fits perfectly with the old dumb-phone vibe.
It’s worth knowing that the buttons on the RePod are more aesthetic choices than working controls, at least on my Apple Watch 7. The volume rocker on the side doesn’t change the volume and simply pulls up a home menu, and the button underneath opens your app library. It feels like a missed opportunity that the little click in the middle of the wheel does nothing at all. Even so, the control system is so accessible that my four-year-old son got stuck into the games and had a whale of a time.
Music Comes With a Catch
Once you’re logged into a session on Arcadia, it’s time to see what else the RePod can do. On older Apple Watch models, despite games being able to play audio, Spotify, YouTube Music and Apple Music won’t play any tracks unless the watch is connected to a Bluetooth audio device. That’s a software limitation built into the apps themselves, presumably because nobody expects you to listen to music on an Apple Watch speaker. The RePod has a little echo chamber that boosts the volume, so you can get quite loud music out of it, but the only way I’ve managed that is with an app called WristTube. It costs around £10 and has a free trial. It’s basically a YouTube player that lets you watch videos and listen to music on your Apple Watch.
If you’d rather stick with the traditional streaming services, you can download songs to the watch and play them offline, which is handy if you want to take the RePod out of the house.
A Dumb Phone That Still Does a Lot
I love the idea of leaving the house without my phone but still being reachable, and that’s exactly what an Apple Watch can offer as a smartphone replacement. You’ll still need an iPhone to set up the apps, and to make it fully work you need a cellular Apple Watch with an active connection, which I don’t have. But the watch is a genuinely capable device. It can make payments through Apple Wallet, take calls and reply to texts, and this form factor makes it fun for a surprising range of tasks.
If you plan to record your voice or talk to someone through the RePod, there’s a small drill point in the side of the case that makes the microphone a lot louder, and in walkie-talkie mode it genuinely becomes a little walkie-talkie. I also like the camera controls, which sync with your iPhone or with cameras from DJI or Insta360. If you film a lot of product shots like I do, you don’t always want the camera mirrored on your wrist during takes, so being able to control it from a case in your pocket is a real benefit.
The big sacrifice is that it’s no longer on your wrist, so you won’t be collecting the fitness data you’re used to. You can still use it as a fitness partner in some capacity, perhaps as a stopwatch, which just feels a bit more fun in this form factor.
Final Thoughts
The RePod C1 costs around £60 in the UK, which I think is a fair price to reinvigorate an old Apple Watch that would otherwise be picking up dust. I can think of two groups who might be interested. The first is people who bought an Apple Watch but never ended up wearing it and want a new way to use it. The second is people upgrading to a newer watch for their wrist who still want to find a use for the old one lying around the house.
My recommendation: If you have an old Apple Watch in a drawer, the RePod C1 is a charming and fairly priced way to give it a second life as a retro gaming handheld and a pocketable extra. If you don’t already own a compatible watch, it isn’t worth buying one just for this.