**Update 11/11/23**
After-Sales customer service is pretty strong with this company. They have emailed me multiple times saying they have passed these issues on to their design team to upgrade and optimize. They even offered a replacement or full refund. I will be updating my rating to 5 stars as the watch does work as “Designed”. Just could use some software tweaks to make it better. We shall see if the issues get addressed in future models.
**Original review 9/22/23**
I would like to start by saying I am comparing this watch to a Garmin Vivoactive 4 with an iPhone 14 Pro Max.
I do a lot of activities at work that keep my hands resting while walking so my Garmin is unable to count the steps accurately. This is common with all smart watches. I can get anywhere between 10-30K steps in a day and I was only getting credit for half of those. Therefore, I ended up keeping my Garmin in my pocket to register them. This left me without a way to see what time it was unless I pulled out the watch, my phone or used “Siri”. So I went looking for an inexpensive watch. That is when I found this Hwagol G20.
The price is awesome at just under $30. Especially when you look at what all it can do. The display is large enough to read and has vibrant colors. It has MANY features. However, I quickly found that several of these are not without problems. Battery last me a couple of days. I just charge it every other. I have never owned an iWatch, but of the ones I’ve seen for friends, I would probably compare this to a MUCH cheaper version of those. It is a 10th of the price of my Garmin.
Note that if you want to get a screen protector for this watch, be sure it specifically says it works for the G20 Hwagol. I accidently got the wrong one and it was a little big.
I’m not a fan of the band though. I much prefer Velcro (hook & loop) bands as they are much more comfortable to me. The metal buckle on standard bands tend to cut in to my wrist. Sadly, this band is 24mm which makes options limited. I’m still trying to find one that will work and is not a fortune.
Now to my primary issues with the watch.
1. Audio through watch. MY BIGGEST ISSUE – Although this is a nice feature, it is constantly trying to play audio through the watch. This is fine if I was using the watch to receive calls or using it to play my music. However, if I am using the actual phone to play a game, watch a video, texting or making a call, I do not want it to play through the watch. I absolutely hate the sound it makes when you are trying to type a message on the phone. Sounds REALLY bad. Yes, you can tell the watch to play audio through the phone instead by swiping down on the screen and then tapping on the icon in the bottom left to switch from watch to phone. However, if you walk away from your phone and come back, it auto reconnects to audio from the watch. So you have to change it again. If you are charging the watch, you simply CAN NOT get it to disconnect audio from the watch. No matter what you do. Even if you tell your phone to “Disconnect”, it connects back again and again. So you have to walk out of range of the watch to get your phone audio back. If you receive a call and answer with your phone, you have to make sure you tell the phone to use the phone as audio or else it will default to watch. Then you have to tell the person on the phone to hold on while you fix the audio. Needs an option to lock in audio settings.
2. Backwards date – It displays day/month instead of month/day like I am used to. Example, September 22, 2023 is shown 22/9. Needs an option to change to 9/22. Would be nice to see year as well, but not that big of a deal.
3. Display during calls – While on a phone call, the watch displays the person you are talking to along with a button to “end call”. You can not change this display. So if you want to see what time it is while in a call, you can’t. Could use an option to press button on side to go back to main display so you can see the time and press again to return to call display.
4. Watch faces and deleting them – The app (JYouPro) has a few more watch faces you can download to the watch. I suspect more faces will be available in the future. However, they are limited and once you download them, I can not seem to delete any that are on the watch. Would be nice to have a way to delete faces. On that note, their is supposed to be a way to add and delete “components” to the watch. These are individual displays for things like weather, blood oxygen, pressure, etc. Although I did see how to add new components, the method to delete does not seem to work. According to the manual, you are to long press for 3 seconds the menu button to get an option to remove. I don’t get one. This needs to work and it could use a similar option to delete watch faces.
5. Sensor accuracy – One of the things that drew my attention to this particular smart watch was the ability to measure blood pressure. My Garmin does measure stress, heart rate, respiration, steps, floors, sleep, hydration and calories, but it does not do blood pressure or oxygen. So I really liked having this additional option. Although blood oxygen seems pretty spot on when comparing to my Sp02 device, the blood pressure however, is way off compared to my blood pressure device. Like 20 points on both numbers. I expect a little difference, but not that much.
6. Sleep monitoring – This is ONLY monitored from 9:00 pm to 11:00 am the next day. States this in the manual. This may be fine for most people, but for someone who works overnights like myself, this just does not work. My Garmin allows me to set the sleep times in it’s app. Furthermore, it works in conjunction with the Health app on iOS and it will record data no matter what time of the day it is. This is handy on my off days as I tend to alter my sleep time during those days. Their really needs to be an option for this setting or allow it to work with the Health app. After all, the Health app DOES allow you to sync data from the JYouPro app so why not the other way?
7. Synchronizing – If you power the watch off like I do to keep the audio from connecting when I’m using my Garmin, you have to synchronize the watch with the app when you power back on. Otherwise the date and time are off. Funny how the audio can reconnect back to the phone when you power on, but the time and date doesn’t?
8. Military time – Even though I have mine set to 12 hour format, for some reason from midnight (12:00 am) to 1:00 am the time is displayed In military format. So 12:24 am displays as 00:24. After it passes from 1:00 am, time display in normal 12 format. Very odd.
In all, this is a pretty descent watch. Again, for the price you just can’t beat it. I feel a lot of my issues could be easily fixed with software updates. Hopefully Hwagol will offer these in the future.