Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsDon't waste your money, buy an 80s calculator watch instead
Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2019
I bought this to have a better somewhat smart watch that looked better than your typical fitness tracker, but all I really wanted it for was to get notifications without taking my phone out of my pocket, and to track workouts (recreational biking, hiking, walks, etc), I really was not asking for a lot. Also, I am definitely not an Apple guy, so the Apple Watch was not an option. I did a fair amount of research on this, and like what I saw, so I bought this for myself over Christmas. I have had this for about 6 months now, and it has essentially just become a glorified watch that I can change the faces on, that's it. The notifications are mostly so delayed it's laughable, sometimes taking up to 30 minutes to register on the watch!! I had an entire phone call with my wife, hung up and about 5 minutes later the watch rang as if she was calling. Checked my phone and no incoming phone call, the watch had just taken that long to pipe up. Text messages are hit and miss, mostly miss, sometimes I never get a notification at all, sometimes it's instant, mostly it's delayed by several minutes. And if you use other apps to communicate, such as FB messenger or WhatsApp, forget it, don't hold your breath for those notifications, they don't happen.
As for the activity tracking, that started decently enough. I used Google Fit and Strava to track a few Hikes, Snowshoe hikes, and bike rides. But about a month in, things began to go downhill. It started where the interface lagged for what seems like ever when trying to get started, so you are inevitably the guy who is holding everyone else up because you're waiting for the watch to get to the right screen. Then it began to stop tracking at random intervals during your exercise with no notice. You would finish your exercise, go to stop the tracking, and be greeted with a message saying "An Error occurred, please restart and try again", which is infuriating when you just hiked 12 miles and wanted to have a record of it. Now it is at the point that it takes so long to even get the tracking app on the watch started that I just use my phone instead. I tried to track a bike ride this morning and waited 20 minutes for Google Fit to stop showing the spinning wheel and show the "start ride" screen, which never happened, so I just gave up. And, if you eventually do get the watch to track the activity, then you have to get it to actually sync with your phone. I have spent hours trying to get the watch to sync activity to Google Fit on my phone, mostly to no avail.
Also, the voice command for Google Assistant is terrible, most of the time it can't register what you're saying and just times out, or just sits there with a spinning circle trying to load the app, and eventually never does. Responding to text messages is hilarious, because you hit send and nothing happens, so you hit send again, nothing happens, hit it a few more times and all of a sudden it catches up and sends the same message 4-5 times.
Now, here we are 6 months later, I have restarted everyday, I have updated the OS, reset the OS, done a factory reset, deleted all 3rd party apps, reloaded all native apps, almost everything I can think of, and I basically have a very expensive Timex that doesn't really do anything well. It is slow, very unresponsive, crashes on almost every app I want to use, and is basically a very disappointing waste of money.
If I had to say a few good things about it, I would say that it looks very nice and I do like being about to get a large array of straps to use on it. Also, changing straps is pretty easy. The battery life is also very good, I can typically get 2-3 days out of it (mostly because I rarely use it for anything these days).
Overall, if you are looking for a nice looking watch with changeable faces and changeable straps, that may or may not let you know about notifications, and you don't want to track any activities or really use any of the apps on your phone, and you want all of this at the mid to higher end of the price range for similar watches, then this is your guy. Otherwise, I would suggest moving along, and don't waste your money.
All in all, I'm pretty disappointed with my purchase
