Smart watches. Remember those apart from apple and maybe fitbit there aren’t, really that many options for people who are looking to get a little bit more functionality out of their timepiece. So i’ve had the chance to play with smart watches over the years from the original lg g watch to the moto 360. Even the microsoft band, all of those being where os watches were formerly android, wear and i’ve, even gotten the chance to play with the apple watch a couple times. Taking a look at that landscape from then and now, nothing has really changed. Apple’S kind of the king of smart watches, fitbit’s, the king of fitness bands and samsung tizen. I guess, is the king of android, wear smart watches, even though they’re on tizen and now merging that’s a whole separate conversation. But i guess they will be the android smartwatch king for now, and maybe finally, when they merge apple, will actually have a legit smartwatch competitor. So what about everyone else? Everyone who doesn’t want to spend the money on an expensive, tizen watch or an apple watch? Even the fitbits can get kind of pricey. What about everyone else? Who just wants a watch for every other day, maybe for their workouts and something a little bit cheaper that they can take on and off when they want to? Well, the only option for a long time was to just get a cheap chinese. Smart watch a knock off of whatever brand and hope that it did the job for you.
I’Ve tried some over the years and they’ve always been terrible, and so i was very interested when halo reached out to me and wanted me to take a look at the lso2 smartwatch, which retails for about 20 to 30 us dollars, depending on where you can find It obviously going into this. My expectations were not that high, but i was actually pleasantly surprised, so let’s get into it and see what this watch is all about: okay, let’s dive in here right away with pro number one of this watch, which is for sure without question the battery life. I know this is a weird one to start off with, but as much as i loved my previous smart watches, even the fossil i reviewed a few years ago, i hated the fact that i had to charge it every day. This watch no joke lasts almost a month on a charge. When i received the watch for the first time and opened the box, it was sitting at about eighty percent battery. I set it up, put it on my wrist, used it for about two weeks every day and every night heart rate sensor on and by the end of it it was still at, like fifty percent two weeks later, i’ve never seen anything like this. This battery life is, without a doubt the best thing about this watch, because i just don’t have to worry about it. If you don’t use it that often or you have the sensor off, it will last about 30 days but advertised with everything on it lasts about 20 days, which is a huge huge deal.
But what is good battery life without good functionality, and that is where pro number two comes in is features remember. This watch is between 20 and 30 us dollars, depending on where you can find it, and for that price you get a surprisingly bright. 1.4. 320 by 320 display, which is about the same sharpness as the apple watch. Funny enough, you get an optical heart rate, monitor 20 or 30 days of battery life, thanks to its 260 milliamp hour battery sleep tracking sitting and phone notifications, so it’ll notify you. You know if you’re sitting for too long 12 sports modes with fitness tracking throughout ip68, water resistance and bluetooth 5.0 – all of this coming in at only 38 grams for the total weight of the watch or just over 1.3 ounces. Overall, this watch has quite a few features packed into this small footprint. How well do they work well for all of us outside of china, not too bad everything, syncs back to the halo, fun app and unfortunately, it doesn’t allow you to sync to other fitness apps like i use, google fit, but it doesn’t sync to that. So you kind of are limited to this one on its own overall, i never once had a problem with either performance or wishing that this watch had an app that i didn’t have. I didn’t use it all that much. I was kind of just using it for the core basic stuff and tracking my steps and sleep and that sort of thing, but this was fine for me because i knew going in that my expectations were going to be very low and therefore i was pleasantly surprised By actually how much this watch offered swiping around the interface is decently intuitive.
Once you get used to it, you swipe down from the top for device settings like find your phone, which it’ll buzz your phone, the watch brightness, which again actually gets really bright, and i usually keep it on setting 1, which is probably why it lasts so long. But brightness 4 is easily visible outdoors there’s a night mode which is basically do not disturb, and you get your device settings in the settings you can change, different watch faces and get to the power menu and that sort of thing out of all the watch faces. I actually prefer the default one it comes with because it gives me all my most important information all in one screen from that main screen. If you swipe up you get to your fitness stuff, like your stats and your different apps to launch, you know whether you want to launch different workouts, swiping, left or right from the mainstream will kind of slide through the different card. Menus and that’ll go from like quick stats like breathing exercises, sleep overview like how much deep sleep you were in versus light sleep and the weather, which is actually a nice addition there’s, actually a good amount of information on the screen. It gives you three days of weather forecast, which is nice all right, so that’s pretty much it for the watch overview. I mean i would dive deeper on it, but it’s a 20 smart watch. You know what you’re getting here other than the price, which is a definite pro let’s, get to the few things i didn’t love about this guy.
First con has to be the battery drain holy crap the moment i first started using this watch. I noticed an immediate hit to the battery life on my phone just having this watch connected and giving me a few notifications a day tracking my steps and things like that immediately impacted my battery life on my phone by 10 to 20 a day, and i have A pixel 5, which has really good battery life, get this on a phone that has a smaller battery and you’d easily be cutting into a quarter of your battery life. Just to run this thing, i have no idea why it does this. The only thing i can think of is that it seems to constantly need your location anytime. I open the app it tells me. I need to reconfirm the location and to let it have background access to all my data there’s, all kinds of crazy stuff, google wouldn’t. Even allow me to give it that much unrestricted data, because it didn’t really trust the app so let’s just say that we’ll leave that there, although different days, would vary based on battery life impact. It was almost never under 10. Definitely a big con here. To start this off, so con number two is for sure the notifications part one of this con is just the constant notifications on my phone. At any moment, there are two permanent notifications saying that the halo, fun app is running in the background and a second one saying that the watch is either connected or disconnected.
This drives me absolutely bananas. I know you can turn them off and i did like right away as soon as this, because it just drives me crazy that it was always there. I could never have a blank notification screen even on silent because they were just always present, it’s, very frustrating without turning them off part. Two of this is the actual notifications on the watch, which are essentially useless. This is easily the worst part about this watch and yes, it buzzes and very strongly actually to let you know that you do have a notification coming in, but then it just shows you this gross gray screen with, like the worst font you’ve ever seen, and the Text gets immediately cut off off the side of the screen, because the name of the app is in the same line as the message. So if you get a notification from an app you’ll figure out most likely, what that app is – and maybe the first word of the notification or not at all, because it just takes up the whole screen it’s nearly useless. I have a facebook messenger group which has like a really long name and it doesn’t even spell out the whole name of the group because it’s just not enough space, i don’t even see what the message is: it’s good to see what app is buzzing you to See if you need to look your phone, but i don’t need a buzz on my wrist to then tell me that i probably still have to look at my phone.
The reason i like smartwatch is because it tells me if i have to look at my phone or not, because it will actually display the notification on my watch and if it is on my watch, i can interact with it from there. If i choose to do so, i will say i appreciate that you can turn off which apps actually notify you so that the ones that are useless you can just turn off, but it’s still a bit of an oversight on the design portion of this watch. All right, i think that just about wraps up this watch review overall, the halo ls02 is a great smart watch and has a surprising amount of features and a half decent build for the price it’s, not perfect, but obviously for 20 or 30 dollars. It’S a pretty easy recommendation for you as long as you have the battery life on your phone to keep up with it. If you just want a cheap, smart watch to do some occasional fitness tracking and maybe some sleep tracking and you don’t – really care about notifications. I’D say definitely go for it. This is a great option if this is what you’re looking for in the sea of crap, that is the cheap smartwatch market. I am confident in saying that this one will satisfy most of your needs if you’re in that category, thanks again so much for watching, everyone really appreciate all the support. Once again, we just hit 5000 subscribers and i’m super happy about that.1Itvx3gig88
