This device struggles with something as basic as showing app notifications properly. I upgraded to it from a Xiaomi Mi Band 2 — a watch that isn’t even sold anymore, that was cheap, and that I was genuinely happy with: simple, easy to use, inexpensive. So what do you actually want from a smartwatch? A decent-looking display, heart rate tracking, long battery life, sleep tracking, and reliably getting call/message/app notifications even when your phone is on silent. That’s it, really.
The display is nice, sure — plenty of watch face options — but at the end of the day it’s a black screen on a black strap, and it looks fairly plasticky in person. Heart rate tracking works, battery life is decent, sleep tracking works too. But there’s still a nagging feeling that something’s missing. For one, it’s not great with Android compatibility — there just aren’t many third-party apps for it. The only two apps you’ll realistically install are one for adjusting settings from your phone, and one that claims to be for sports but really exists just so you can look at the data it collects.
For Turkey specifically: the watch has NFC, but there’s no supporting app to actually use it, so that feature is effectively dead on arrival. The vibration motor felt weak to me. The interface also feels needlessly cluttered — all the widgets look like slightly different versions of the same generic thing. A notification comes in, you look at the watch, you don’t actually see the notification itself — you have to swipe over to a separate notification panel every time. Not intuitive at all; it takes real effort to learn how to use.
There are a huge number of watch face options, but honestly it comes across as a bit gimmicky — just a picture on a screen, nothing more. Most people seem to like the round watch face design, but I don’t, because the whole point of “round” is supposed to be mimicking clock hands moving — and this watch doesn’t even do that. A band-style smart watch might actually suit sports better anyway — it doesn’t restrict your wrist’s backward movement the way a round watch case can.
It’s usable, sure, but the worst part is the software ecosystem — the lack of proper Android/Google Play app support. There’s a “Samsung Market” of sorts, but it’s mostly clutter, and most of what’s there is just phone-display-related junk. The specs (processor, RAM) are all “fast, great,” supposedly — but none of that matters if you can’t actually install useful apps on it. Right now, there’s just nothing worth installing.
For comparison, what the cheap watch I had years earlier did better: the Xiaomi Mi Band 2’s battery lasted longer, it was lighter, everything was managed through one single app which made it much easier to use, the vibration motor was stronger, and it compared your sleep data against other users’ and gave you actual suggestions based on it.
There’s no real manual — you just have to learn as you go. For example, if you remove a widget from your phone, the watch stops tracking that data entirely. How was I supposed to know that? I just want to check my own data on the tiny screen without it forcing a specific widget setup. The most common thing people say about this watch is “you get used to it over time” — which honestly says a lot about how user-friendly it actually is.
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