This electronic badge looks printed until it starts moving — but the app leaves you to do all the work

I did not buy this because it was useful. I bought it because it was cute. It is called the Badge Magic Pro — a round electronic badge, about the size of a bottle cap, that pins to your shirt and plays your own pictures, slideshows and GIFs on a little circular colour screen. If you only buy things that earn their place, stop reading now. This is a toy.

What I did not expect was how convincing it looks. Not "nice screen for the money" convincing — I mean that if you did not already know it was electronic, you would probably assume it was a printed enamel pin. The image sits right up against the glass and there is no visible pixel structure at a normal distance. Then it moves, and that is the whole trick.

Watch the full video review on YouTube.

Out of the box you get the badge, a leaflet with a QR code for the app, and USB-C charging. It came in several colours; I got the blue one. First impressions were better than I expected — the paint job is sharp and attention-grabbing, and the badge is not as edge-to-edge as the listing photos make it look, but it still looks good. There is no charging indicator at all, which is the first small annoyance: you plug it in and you just have to guess.

The pairing instruction in the leaflet is wrong

The instructions say to tap the screen to bring up a pairing QR code. I tapped it. Nothing. I tapped it again from a few angles, still nothing, and the app just kept telling me it could not find the device.

What actually works is a single press of the blue Bluetooth button on the back. Then the QR code appears, the app scans it, and it connects straight away. That is a couple of minutes of confusion caused by one wrong line on a leaflet, and it is the first thing I would tell anyone who buys one.

The app gives you absolutely nothing to start with

The app is called E-Badge, and once you are connected you get four modes: single image, marquee, image slideshow and animated GIF. What you do not get is anything to put in them. No sample artwork, no pattern library, nothing built in at all.

So the badge does nothing until you go and find pictures yourself. I ended up downloading a few photos and some anime art before I could test anything. I am a mobile developer myself, so I will be a bit blunt: the app is not bare bones exactly, but it is not polished either, and shipping it with zero content is a strange choice for a product whose entire appeal is what is on the screen.

On the badge, it stops looking like a screen

Once I had pushed a slideshow across — one image every two seconds, which is the setting I liked — the effect landed. Held at any normal distance the badge does not read as a display. It reads as a printed picture on a pin.

One honest caveat: the camera does not do it justice. On camera the colours wash out, partly because of reflections and the angle I was filming at. In person they are noticeably richer than what you see in the video. And it is a small backlit screen, so I would not expect it to be readable in direct sunlight.

The pin on the back is the good kind

Flip it over and there is a stiff steel bar pin across the back, the same sort you get on a decent enamel badge, not a cheap stick-on clip or a weak magnet. Alongside it are the physical controls: power, Bluetooth, transfer and brightness.

The brightness control is worth knowing: a triple tap lowers it, and a short press three times raises it. Level three is the maximum and it is bright enough for indoor use. There is also a swipe-down control panel on the badge itself with the brightness levels and an auto-sleep toggle you can turn off if you want the screen to stay on.

Actually wearing it

Pinned to a shirt it sits flat and you forget it is there. This is the part where the gimmick pays off — from someone else's eye level it is a small round picture on your chest that suddenly starts animating.

I sent it a GIF as well, and video is supported too. The GIF looked like it was running at a lower brightness than the still images, which I did not work out the reason for. What did impress me: nothing gets overwritten. Swipe on the badge and you cycle between the GIF and the slideshow photos I had sent earlier — they are all still in there. I do not know how much memory it has, but it clearly is not one-image-at-a-time.

The thing that will annoy you daily

It disconnects after every transfer, almost certainly to save battery. That means every time you want to change what the badge is showing, you reconnect first. Once you know that, it is a small ritual rather than a fault — but combined with an app that has no content of its own, changing what is on your badge is a more deliberate task than it should be.

Who this is actually for

If you want a wearable novelty — for a convention, a cosplay, a conference badge with your own artwork, or just to see who notices — this is genuinely one of the more fun things I have bought. It is cheap, it looks better than it has any right to, and the moving-picture reveal works on people.

If you want something useful, or something that works the moment you take it out of the box, skip it. Every good thing this does, you have to set up yourself first.