I own an apple watch and am mostly happy with it, but I’m planning on going on a trek where I won’t necessarily be able to provide the daily recharge that the apple watch requires. This smart watch promised a 5 t0 7 day working time so I thought I’d give it a try. Accurate time was, of course, one of my major interests but I also wanted to track my heart rate and caloric expenditure. My first smart watch, when smart watches first came out, was a Samsung that cost about $300 and was incapable of delivering an accurate pulse reading. I know the technology has improved since then, but still I was concerned about how accurate a pulse measurement this smart watch would deliver. I checked the watch’s accuracy against several sports devices that also measured heart rate and it was well within the variation range of all the other devices. I also checked it against the pulse reading on a blood pressure tracker that I own and it was accurate there as well. It did seem the watch was a bit slow to respond to pulse rate changes, but eventually it got there. The other thing I noticed is that when I first put on the watch it doesn’t respond to my actual pulsed rate until after I wake it by first forcing it to take a pulsed measure. I noticed that after taking the watch off, it continues to show the last valid pulse reading. I would prefer that the watch would report that it can’t get a pulse reading. On the positive side, after I manually requested a pulse reading and the watch wasn’t properly positioned, the watch displayed the correct wrist placement for the watch. I appreciate that feature. Now, when I first put the watch on I request that it read my pulse, and after that it reports an accurate measure.
I was skeptical that a watch could report an accurate blood pressure, but when I compared the watches report against my dedicated blood pressure monitor the measurements matched. It was the same when I compared the watches Spo2 reading against my dedicated Spo2 measuring device. While the watches readings seemed to read consistently high, it only differed from my Spo2 device by a few percentage points.
The watch comes with two bands, a plastic band already attached to the watch and a dressier looking metal band. Since I intent to use the plastic band for now I haven’t really messed with the metal band.
A did notice a couple things that I’m not entirely happy about. The temperature on the weather readout doesn’t display the area’s outdoor temperature but the temperature around the watch. Unless, you happen to be outdoors, of course. Alos actual workout data, such as calories expended, steps and so on, aren’t reported to the iPhones exercise app but to the app dedicated to the watch. It would be nice to have all this data in one location.
Anyway, for my trekking purposes the watch surpasses what I hopped it would do. I’m very happy to have it.