Smartwatches
Speaker 1: Good smartwatches do exist under a hundred dollars and I found the best three options to save you some cash. Hi, I'm Lexi. Welcome to your Weekly Dose of all things mobile. Make sure to subscribe for more. Let's go. Sure, you could think about spending a little bit more money and getting an Alpha Watch SE for around $250. Maybe the Galaxy Watch four or five is more your jam for around $150, but why even spend that much when these three wearables can do pretty much everything you need? The best [00:00:30] part is that all of them work with Android and iPhone. I have the CMF Buy Nothing Watch Pro, which is $69, the Am Amazed Fit Bit Five, unity also $69, and the Xmi Smart Band eight Pro, which is kind of a hybrid between a fitness tracker and a smartwatch and that's $90. Now the biggest screen is on the Nothing Watch. Speaker 1: That's 1.96 inches and here's a visual to show you how bright each of them gets at their maximum setting outside. Now only the smart band and the Nothing [00:01:00] Watch have an always on display, but only the smart band has an automatic brightness sensor. That means you won't have to manually turn the screen brightness up or down depending on the lighting conditions. So let's go through the main smartwatch features that they all have. Of course, all these watches can show notifications from your phone. If you're on iOS, you're only going to be able to see those notifications come through, but if you're paired to an Android phone, you can also respond to them with quick replies. All of them have the ability to find your phone by [00:01:30] making it ring from the watch as long as you're in Bluetooth range. Act as a remote control for your phone camera set alarms view your calendar. Speaker 1: Music playback control. They have lots of different clock faces to choose from and all of them are water resistant, but some of them have a few exclusive features you might want. The smart band has Alexa support and I also really like these widgets that appear when you swipe over from the side of the clock face, which gives you really easy access to features. The Nothing Watch is the only [00:02:00] one with a speaker and microphone on board. So this means you'll be able to take quick calls from your wrist when your phone is nearby and know that none of these have NFC or mobile payments built in, at least not for the US market. Which one looks best on your wrist? So all of these are square or rectangular designs. The Sleekest look I think is the amazed Fit Watch for me at least with this stainless steel edge. Speaker 1: My wrist measures 152 millimeters so you can get a bit of an idea of what they might look like on you. The smart [00:02:30] band is the most incognito and if you really want to stand out from the crowd, the Nothing Watch does just that. Especially with this bright orange band, it has the coolest watch faces in my opinion. They're very designy. The Bit five and the Nothing Watch have a side button as well as the touch screen so you can move through the interface really easily. The smart band is a touch screen only, so it does take a little bit longer to get those gestures down for navigation and overall responsiveness. The nothing Speaker 2: Watch feels the fastest [00:03:00] with the least amount of lag when using the interface. Now, a few factors will eat into how much runtime you get on each of these watches. The always on display using the Built-in GPS having 24 7 heart rate tracking turned on and blood oxygen monitoring definitely will eat the battery faster. Now the official ratings on each of these watches on the Bit five Unity up to 11 days or five days with heavy use. The Nothing watch up to 13 days and the smart band up to 14 days. Now that's the [00:03:30] official numbers, but in reality with some GPS workouts, phone notifications, sleep tracking in general use, they actually all lasted a similar length of time for me between seven to nine days before needing to charge. Now let's talk about the accompanying app because this is where you're going to be doing most of the customization and especially where you're going to be seeing all of your stats and metrics over time. Speaker 2: Now, me Fitness, which is the app that you'll use with the smart band is my least favorite of the three. It does not make it easy to see your workout [00:04:00] or activity history. The zep app for the BIP has more functionality and for me is the easiest to use and the Nothing app kind of sits in the middle. It does look great, but some of the visuals make it really hard to interpret the data, especially when it comes to sleep tracking. All of these watches have more workout types than you could ever use with over a hundred different activities each of them can track. So whether you're into canoeing, curling, or just plain old running, there's something here for everybody. Now in particular, I really like [00:04:30] the visual guidance on the smart band, which applies to some workout types. You'll see there's this warmup button that shows a range of exercises you can go through, and this watch also has some training programs built in specifically for running, so you can use it to train intervals for endurance, fat burn and more. Speaker 2: A lot of the time these cheap watches will have all of the same bells and whistles from the big name brands, but what I want to know and what you probably want to know as well is are they accurate? I did a 20 minute run comparing the heart rate monitor on each of them to a chest [00:05:00] strap. The smart band was the least accurate in average heart rate and matching up to that strap during my run. The BIP was the closest and the nothing watch was second right in the middle. Then I compared the built-in GPS on these watches On an outdoor walk against a control phone, locking onto a signal was almost 10 seconds faster on the smart band than it was on the Nothing Watch. But when I looked at the results, the Nothing Watch was the closest to the control phone. In terms of overall distance, I'm not really [00:05:30] sure what happened to the step count from the smart band because it was way off the other two measures. You'll notice I'm only comparing the Nothing Watch and the smart band against the phone here because the Bit Five Unity doesn't have built-in GPS. Instead, it uses connected GPS from your phone. But don't worry if you do want built-in GPS and you do like the look of this watch, you could look at the regular bit five. It only costs $10 more. Now sleep tracking was another Speaker 3: Bag. The Nothing watch didn't detect any awake time at all [00:06:00] on any nights during my entire sleep testing process. The BIP was the best at picking up awake time, but all of them were very similar at detecting the time at which I fell asleep and when I woke up. So now it comes down to the winner and yes, it's going to depend on what you value the most. The best screen for me is on the smart band Pro eight. It's the easiest to see outdoors and good if I only wanted smartwatch functionality, not fitness accuracy. The B five Unity has the best app and the [00:06:30] most streamlined look and the Nothing Watch is the only one that you're going to be able to take calls from on your wrist. But if I'm picking an overall winner, for me it's the bit five Unity because of the combination of sensor accuracy, the app and the design. Thanks so much for watching. I hope this was helpful in choosing the right budget smartwatch for you. As always, let me know any extra questions you have and I'll catch you next time.
