You Can Buy A Full-featured Smartwatch For Only $50 At Amazon — Today Only
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This good-looking watch is cheap, but don't let the price fool you into thinking it's not good. (Photo: Amazfit)
If you've ever shopped for a smartwatch, you've probably looked at models ranging from the Apple Watch to the Fitbit Sense to the Samsung Galaxy Watch — all of which have price tags that leave you questioning just how "smart" a purchase they might be.
Indeed, these wearables start at $279, $300 and a jaw-dropping $400, respectively. So when faced with the Amazfit Bip U Pro, which is on sale today for $50 (down from $70), you could understandably jump to the conclusion it must be cheap, feature-deprived junk.
It's not. In fact, the Bip U Pro is a remarkably good smartwatch — not perfect, by any means, but capable enough for users who want the key amenities afforded by these devices: fitness tracking, phone notifications and so on.
And Amazon will give you free shipping too. But if you have Amazon Prime, you’ll get so much more — from access to new movies and TV shows, discounts at Whole Foods, exclusive sales and two-day shipping on many, many items. Not yet a member? No problem. You can sign up for your free 30-day trial here.
$50 $70 at Amazon
I've tried a number of Amazfit wearables over the past couple years, and I've been impressed with most of them. The Bip U Pro is one of the best yet, able to pair with any Android phone or iPhone and display incoming calls, text messages, calendar reminders, news alerts and other notifications.
You can also use it to play or pause your music and even remotely trigger your phone's camera shutter.
As a fitness band, the Bip U Pro offers more features than you'd expect, including heart-rate monitoring, a blood-oxygen sensor and tracking capabilities for steps, stress and sleep. However, it's hard to gauge just how accurate some of these sensors are; I noticed at times that unless you wear the watch in just the right spot on your wrist, and wear it fairly snugly to boot, heart-rate numbers can vary quite a bit.
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Hello, plastic pal! Available in black, green and pink, the Bip U Pro can keep tabs on your steps, sleep, heart rate and other important health info. (Photo: Amazon)
Unlike a lot of budget wearables, this one has built-in GPS, meaning it can record your walks, runs, bikes and other outdoor activities even if you're not carrying your phone.
It also has built-in Amazon Alexa, which does require your phone to be nearby. (Alexa doesn't work without connectivity.) Unfortunately, in my experience the feature doesn't perform very well. It's a pain to set up and just doesn't work reliably.
Listen, it's a $50 watch — something's gotta give. I'm not a huge fan of the Bip's companion app, either, which is confusingly called Zepp. It's not very intuitive and it doesn't always do a good job keeping the watch up to date, like with weather data.
But the Bip U Pro has a big, bright screen and a battery that's good for up to nine days; you're lucky to get two days from an Apple Watch, which costs at least four times the money.
Indeed, at this price I'm willing to forgive a few minor shortcomings. If you want to try a smartwatch but don't want to spend hundreds of dollars for the privilege, this is a great place to start.
$50 $70 at Amazon
The reviews quoted above reflect the most recent versions at the time of publication.
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Without Audio Clips, Messaging On A Smartwatch Is Useless To Me
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
Rita El Khoury
Opinion Post
There are three reasons I use a smartwatch: to get step-by-step directions on my wrist when going to a new place, to control my music without unlocking my phone, and to be notified of new messages. My Galaxy Watch 4 — and Wear OS watches in general — is pretty good at handling the first two tasks, but it’s almost abysmal at the last one. Messaging on a Wear OS smartwatch is simply far below par, and one indication of that is the lack of voice message support.
Our picks: The best smartwatches you can buy
Messaging nowadays is richer and more complex than sending simple text-only blurbs. We share images and videos; we intersperse our texts with emojis; we rely on stickers and GIFs to show exactly how we feel. And for millions of users, especially those living in non-English-speaking countries, messaging is also simpler thanks to audio clips.
Seven billion voice messages are sent on WhatsApp every day. That's only one platform.
Talking is faster than typing, less error-prone than multilingual keyboards or transliteration, and it makes your intonation clearer than any impersonal characters on a screen ever could. For those reasons and many others, voice notes have been widely adopted. This one metric tells you the full story: WhatsApp says that seven billion voice messages get sent every day on its platform — that’s billion with a B. Imagine the number when all messaging apps are combined.
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
But despite their popularity, voice notes still aren’t supported by Google’s smartwatch platform. It can’t play them back when you receive them, nor can it record them to send them. In that regard, it’s as “smart” as a simple fitness tracker with on-screen notifications. Even if a Wear OS smartwatch has a speaker and a microphone (like the Galaxy Watch 4, for example), even if it’s connected to a Bluetooth headset, it doesn’t support audio clips. This is a problem with both the official Google Messages app and any third-party messengers that send notifications to your wrist, like WhatsApp and Telegram.
Even if a Wear OS smartwatch has a speaker and a microphone, it can neither play nor record voice messages.
At least five times out of ten, when my Watch 4 vibrates, I look at it and see that I received a “Voice message” from a friend or relative. Tapping that doesn’t do anything. I have to unlock my phone to hear the message and reply. If my watch is as useless as a notification ping half the time, and I constantly have to pull out my phone, I might as well not wear the watch to begin with.
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
Inconsistency and unreliability ruin the entire messaging experience for me. It’s bad enough that I’ve grown accustomed to ignoring notifications on my wrist because they’re adding time, not shaving it off. It’s just faster to go straight to my phone.
Inconsistency ruins the entire smartwatch messaging experience. It's just faster to go straight to my phone.
That’s why most days, when I’m working from home, I rarely bother to wear my watch. My media can be controlled from my computer or Google Home speakers, and I don’t need step-by-step directions. Messaging would be enough of a use case to make me wear the watch, if Google supported it. Apple does, so what’s the hold-up, Googz? We can only hope we’ll get this with the upcoming Pixel Watch.
How important is voice message support on smartwatches to you?371 votes
Crucial. A lot of my contacts use voice notes.
32%
Important but I could live without it.
22%
I'd only need it every now and then.
12%
Not at all. Neither I nor my contacts use voice messages.
33%
CommentsPixel Watch To Come With Huge RAM For A Smartwatch
(Pocket-lint) - Google's upcoming Pixel Watch is set to push Wear OS forward with specs that no smartwatch running the operating system has yet been able to match, according to new reports.
While the exact amount of RAM that the watch will pack in hasn't been made clear, 9to5Google is reporting that it will be an upgrade on the 1.5GB that powers the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4.
While something like 2GB of RAM wouldn't sound like much as part of a smartphone, in the world of watches it would be a pretty solid amount.
Similarly, the watch will apparently run Exynos 9110, a chipset built by Samsung, rather than some smaller version of Google's own Tensor platform. The watch will have a co-processor to handle background tasks like some its tracking.
Finally, the report indicates that the watch will have a generous 32GB of onboard memory for the storage of songs and apps, something that will be a great help to those looking to listen to music without needing their phone or full signal for streaming.
Whether these specifications turn out to be accurate will take a little while to be confirmed, of course - they're only rumours at this stage, and could well be disproven when Google does eventually go into more detail about the watch later this year.
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