How much would you expect to pay for that product? How about 20 bucks, Music, hi everyone and welcome back to a better computer? My name is matt and today i’m reviewing this the wise watch, the absurdly priced smartwatch, to put this into a little perspective. This is my day to day watch it’s an apple watch series 6., it cost 800, which is a little crazy, and i could buy 40 of these instead and even if i went with the lower end apple watch se, i could still get 14 of these. So the the pricing is just absurd, so, while i could go on and on about how this product rips off the apple watch in terms of design and ui that’s, not really going to be the focus of this review, the apple watch is far more capable has Far better build quality and is far better of an experience in most ways for most people, so with that out of the way, let’s take a look at what you get for 20, with the wise watch. First, impressions are a little rough and the 20 price tag is clearly felt right away. The included watch strap is a cheap rubber that collects sweat like crazy, and i thought the body was made of plastic until i read the product sheet which insists it’s aluminum. I also noticed immediately that the display is off center with a pretty substantially bigger bottom bezel than the top. None of this is the end of the world, but if you came into this product wondering how did they get the price down so far, you start to see the corners cut right away: it’s, not horrible, but it’s – definitely not as premium as other smart watches.
The setup process is relatively easy, as you just need to install the wise app on your phone and add a new device. It will auto, detect the watch and pairs in less than a minute. Frankly, the setup was easier and quicker than i expected it to be. Let’S talk about actually using the product, though so i’m going to talk about, watch faces i’m, going to talk about the apps that come installed on it and i’m, going to talk about general, build quality and usability of the product in general. First, there are. The watch faces and honestly i don’t think they’re terrible they’re, not what i’d call classy but they’re, all pretty fun. Watch knobs will probably scoff, but these are some bold watch faces. That will definitely appeal to some people. There are 10 styles to choose from, and four color combos for each watch face. You can only have three loaded on your watch at the same time and they can only be managed from the wise app on your phone. Also, adding a watch face takes literally one full minute and your watch is out of commission the whole time, it’s kind of weird and i’m not really sure what could possibly be taking so long, but it does also there’s no concept of customization with these watch faces. They all show the time, but some show activity data some show the date you really don’t have any control, basically whatever they’ve set as watch faces.
Those are what you’re going to use. I think these watch faces are generally fun, but they’re not going to beat everyone’s taste next up are the apps. Unlike the other major smartwatch platforms out there, you can’t install any new apps on the wise watch. You just get the apps that are pre installed. There are a total of nine apps and conveniently for me that means i can go over each one right now and give you a comprehensive overview of what the watch does. First up is workouts and the app just starts a workout. The moment you launch it there’s. No settings for what type of workout you’re doing it really seems designed for walking or running though, and it tracks your heart rate and pace as you go, and even syncs that data over to health kit, which is nice, it does not auto, detect workouts. It does not auto pause workouts and it doesn’t notify you of time or distance milestones as you go, it’s very minimal, but it does technically work. Data is the next app and it was confusing to me at first since, when you initially put on the watch, you have this mysterious data app and screen over to the left of your watch. Face that just tells you there is no data. This is actually where you can see your step count and calories, burn stats. Think of it, like the activity app on the apple watch, the blood oxygen app lets you take o2 readings, just like the apple watch series 6 and the numbers i’ve gotten have been basically in line with what i get on the apple watch.
When i test immediately afterwards, the heart rate, app checks, your pulse on demand and again seems pretty accurate and pretty similar to what the apple watch reports you can also go into the settings and have the watch check your pulse in the background. Every five minutes all the data gets synced over to the health app on your iphone. The sleep app is fine as well, although i find it about as helpful as the apple watch is built in sleep tracking, which is to say not very alarms are what you’d expect and you can set a bunch of them easily. Timers also work well and you’re. Limited to one timer at a time, shortcuts are an interesting idea, but i couldn’t get them to work myself, mostly they’re ways to control your other wise accessories, which i don’t actually own. The final app is weather and it’s really basic, but it gets you. The current conditions and temperature, which is often enough you can change the location in the wise app on your phone too. If you don’t want to use your specific location and then we have the general experience of using the wise watch as you’ve probably noticed already. The watch is not slow necessarily, but the screen refreshes incredibly slowly. I measured this a few times and found it updates at five times per second that’s, five hertz, which is actually worse than the best e ink displays on e readers today, which is really bad by comparison.
The apple watch has a 60 hertz screen that goes up and down based on what you’re doing, but it always looks smooth this. It almost looks like there’s no animations most of the time it might go without saying, but this watch does not have a noise on display, so you have to wake it by raising your wrist or by tapping the button on the side. There’S no tap to wake, which would have been nice to have here, especially because the raise to wake is pretty slow. I think it’s, even slower than the original apple watch, which was already slower than i’d, like maybe my biggest problem with the screen, is the fact that there’s no light sensors so there’s no ambient light sensor. It has no idea how bright it is. So you have three settings low, medium and high for the screen brightness you set it and then that’s what it is forever. There is a way to change it manually, but it’s kind of a pain, and you really don’t want to have to deal with this. So if you’re setting it to medium, which i think looks good in most places, it means it’s going to be a little hard to see outside unless you change it and you have to remember to set it too low before you go to bed or before you Turn on a movie or something otherwise it’s going to blind you in the dark on the plus side, it does have the feature the apple watch has, where you can slap your palm on the screen to turn it off, which i actually like a lot.
You also may have noticed. I have not entered a passcode at any point in this video and that’s, because the wise watch has zero security and has no idea if it’s, actually on my wrist or not. This was actually kind of shocking but yeah. The watch is 100 accessible by anyone who gets their hands on it. So i guess don’t. Let anyone steal it it’s also kind of annoying, because if you leave it on a table – and you have notifications sent into it, it’s still going to send those notifications when it’s off your wrist and so you’re, going to hear your watch buzz on the counter table. Wherever you’ve put it so that’s annoying too moving on to the ui, the wise watch definitely borrows heavily from the apple watch. With a swipe down on the watch, face bringing up notifications swiping up to bring up a control center and holding down to change the watch face these aren’t terrible and frankly, it’s made it easy to get used to the new watch. It even has a find your phone button that will play a sound on your phone to help you find it when you’ve lost it. Notifications are actually hilariously bad, so you can turn on notification forwarding to the device, but they have some preset categories, but i don’t have most of these. Most of these are irrelevant to me. So almost everything i get falls under this other category and the other category is really rough.
It doesn’t tell you what app is sending the notification doesn’t send any attachments or you can’t, respond to them or anything. Obviously it doesn’t do any of that, and so you have to figure out. Is this a text message? Is it a dm? Is it a news alert like what is this it’s it’s pretty rough? So while it does technically forward your notifications, it’s not particularly good at it, and if you like, the apple, watches, stand notifications, then don’t worry, the wise watch has you covered. They do stretch notifications every hour to make sure that you’ve gotten up and moved uh and basically it’s the exact same concept. If you haven’t stood up in the past hour, it gives you a notification at the 45 minute mark on the hour to have you get up, do something whatever so that’s what you get with a 20 smartwatch it’s, not that bad. Considering the price point i mean don’t get me wrong. This is nowhere near to the apple watch and in this video i couldn’t even bring myself to wear the wise watch like it’s, not for me, but i could see some audiences where it does work pretty. Well. I think if you have a young child who needs a watch who could use a little bit of the notifications who would like to be able to see the time just some basic smartwatch stuff, it could be nice. I think the apple watch sc fills that role.
Pretty well, but it is really nice to have a watch. That’S super, cheap and disposable, if necessary. If the kid breaks it or loses it or whatever – and it has a 9 day battery life, so they don’t have to remember to charge it every day, which is definitely a plus for kids, but yeah it’s kind of more of a feature: phone style of smartwatch Kind of a feature watch, if you will, it has some versions of smartwatch functionality. It has workout tracking, it has timers and stuff, it has the weather. It has all that it has some of the notification stuff, but it doesn’t do any of it particularly well and it’s, not expandable, so you can’t give it more functionality by installing third party apps or anything. It really is what it is. So with that in mind, i think it again. It might be useful for kids. It might be useful for some older people uh in your lives, who maybe don’t, want all the features you don’t want to pay all the money for that, but would like to get notifications um. It does not have a microphone, so you can’t talk into it. You can’t take phone calls or anything like that very basic, but i think that it could be again for that. Incredibly low price point could fit into some people’s use cases, but yeah. That is my review of the wise watch. It is absurdly priced. That is the reason that it got on this channel it’s not going to replace my apple watch of course, but if you enjoyed this review, please hit the subscribe button.kr5Juhd1M-o
