Smart Watch for UNDER £50 – AMAZING OR TERRIBLE? Tinwoo Quartz Review
Smart watches aren’t anything new – they’ve been around for almost a decade in the form we know now and for the most part the main innovations have been battery life and price, going from hundreds of pounds for a fairly basic option like the old pebble watch, to now apparently under £50 getting you an apparently reasonable one. So, what does your £45 get you? Well let’s take a look, but first if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos like this one every monday, wednesday and friday!
Now, I’ve checked out cheap smart watches before, with the TicWatch S standing out as an incredible value at around £100. That is a full android wear watch meaning you get really good integration with apps, notifications and media controls, and the usual fitness tracking bits too, and 24/7 heart rate monitoring and has around 2 days of battery life plus great build quality for the price too.
So, for less than half that price, does the Tinwoo Quartz have any of those features? Well lets start with the OS. As you might expect for the price, its not an android wear watch. It looks to be a very lightweight custom option that looks like it has been designed around this super low end hardware. You can do the usual swiping around to navigate, with swiping from right to left getting you the “app drawer” if you can call it that. Its settings page has a total of 3 settings, the first changes the watch face, the second is screen brightness and third is how long you get before the screen turns itself off – of which you can set it to always on, but that lowers the brightness.
You do also get fitness tracking features built in. If you swipe from left to right you get a step counter, distance counter and calories burned estimate, plus going back to the “app drawer” lets you tell it you are going to do an activity and will monitor your progress. You do also have heart rate monitoring, that’s on the left most page, but I wouldn’t count on it too heavily, as I regularly found it to just report a slight fluctuation between 68-78 bpm, despite my actual heart rate being higher or lower.
Now, much to my surprise, this does receive notifications from your phone. It is a very basic setup, but I got every single notification my phone got on the watch – and it vibrated for all of them, a feature i don’t think you can turn off. While you might get notifications, that doesnt mean you get to actually see what they are as many just come up with the name of the group chat or notification rather than the content. You also cant interact with them, no “open on phone” and definitely no reply on watch.
The only sort of watch to phone controls are the media options. You can play/pause, skip forward and back and increase or decrease music volume, but strangely while it will tell you what song is playing, it does it as a notification, rather than anywhere near the media controls. And only sometimes…
So, it has barebones versions of most features youd expect to see on a smart watch, but what about the other stuff? Well, battery life wise, the tiny 210mah unit only seems to last for about a day and a half on full brightness and 3 second screen on time. That’s not terrible, but a very far gap to the quotes 13+ days of “working time” quoted on their website. Charging is fairly easy, with the magnetic usb cable, and means the watch is IP68 rated which is great.
Comfort wise, the more premium metal band version is what i have, it used a magnet to hold itself closed and despite a bit of pinching from the basically chainmail band, it ended up being faily comfy to wear for a full day.
So, is this insanely each smart watch worth it? Honestly, maybe. At least as a sort of “first” smart watch, its not bad. Its basic for sure, but works well, has over a day of battery life and being less than half the price of a ‘real’ smart watch, its hard to argue.
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TechteamGB Score
