It’s, a smart watch powered by the movement of your body, so it never needs charging or say they say let’s find out and by the way, if you enjoy this review, please do hit the subscribe button below to Be alerted of more reviews of gadgets and tech next week, i’ll be looking at the new iphone 12 and seeing whether it’s worth upgrading. Now, if you’ve saw my review of the withings move, smartwatch you’ll know that whatever else a smartwatch might be able to do, there are two fundamental design requirements on that score. I’Ve always thought johnny ive must have been having a bit of an off day when he designed the apple watch. I mean: how exactly did he fail to spot that the hands of a watch go around in a circle? Surely he knew what should always be round like a steering wheel should always be round. Secondly, a watch shouldn’t need charging more than once every couple of weeks. At most i mean who on earth wants to have to remember to pack a watch charger when they go on holiday. Only if a smartwatch meets these basic requirements am i interested in whatever else it can do other than tell me the time, but even then i don’t need a watch to check the weather forecast to listen to music, to get email alerts to look at a map Or to enter the nuclear launch codes, i can do all that perfectly well on my iphone.
The only extra thing i really wanted to watch is a pedometer to tell me how much exercise i’ve taken that day and keep nudging me to do more that’s all now. The withing steel hr was a pretty good watch. It has an integral pedometer and only needs charging every 25 days, but i found the rubbery strap a bit uncomfortable a bit sweaty and, although i think they’ve now fixed it, my early model fogged up the withinx move, was even better that only needed a new battery. Every 18 months, but it had the same rubbery, strap problem and because it’s a budget watch, it did feel a bit well budgety anyway, a year later and apple has just given us the watch 6, which i think now lasts a full 15 minutes before it needs Charging – and this latest model can now give you a completely inaccurate blood oxygen reading, which is just what you need if you think, you’ve got a respiratory virus. So how does the supercharger 2 stack up? Well, first things. First, i bought this off the crowdfunding website, kickstarter, like so many things in this coronavirus world. We now live in it’s, taken much longer than expected to arrive. Still, the watch came with this nice card inside which says. Thank you for your patience. This has been a longer journey than planned, hopefully worth the wait and it’s signed by an actual person, that’s a really nice touch. Although the hashtag swiss made me smile, given that the parcel arrived from taipei anyway, let’s take a look here, it is – and i have to say first impression i really like it.
It’S got a lovely, clean, simple design, with a really big pedometer dial it’s a few millimeters thicker than your average watch and probably a little bit thicker than i would like, but not disastrously. So, on the back, you can see the watch innards. In fact, the supercharger 2 does come with a charger for those occasions when it might need a bit of a jump start. For example, if it’s been sitting in a container ship from taipei for a few weeks there we go now to start the watch. First, you have to double click, the crown a little blue light flashes and the pedometer indicator goes through one cycle gosh. I do love that i could sit here and watch that all day long. Then it says to pop it on the charger for an hour. Meantime i’ve downloaded the app and entered my weight and height and oh, it needs the serial number too. My god, that’s, tiny, you’re gon na need one of these now that’s all set up and charged time to strap it on and see how well it works there. We go i’ll report back in a couple of days: i’ve been wearing the supercharger 2 for a couple of days now and unfortunately, there’s been a bit of a problem a few hours after i started the watch. The dial indicated that i’d done about 5 000 steps, which was a bit of a miracle, given that all i’d actually done was walk 50 foot to the kitchen a few times.
My first thought was now that’s, my kind of pedometer. I wonder if i could persuade these guys to make me a blood pressure monitor anyway. The next day i compared the supercharger with the within steel hr. By the end of the day, the supercharger had recorded 12 314 steps versus the steel, which had recorded 8677 steps. That’S a big difference so which is right well, on the next day, i left the watches off until the start of my habitual one hour. Walk around the village, which i calculate is about 6 200 steps give or take. When i got back the supercharger read six thousand four hundred and four steps, the iphone reads: six thousand four hundred and seventy two steps and the steel hr read six thousand hundred and 336 steps that’s odd, because they’re all pretty close, having already established that when out For a walk, these things are reasonably accurate. I then strap them to my wrist one more time for a few hours when i was mainly at my desk working but occasionally stood up to go to the loo, not at my desk, you understand or to make a cup of coffee three hours later and the Withings showed 460 steps. The supercharger, on the other hand, showed 1 360.. So it looks like both watches record the steps you take when you go for a walk reasonably accurately, certainly accurately enough to give you an indication of whether you’ve taken enough exercise that day.
The problem is that the supercharger 2 gets a bit confused by the more random movements you make over the course of the rest of the day. The company that makes this watch is called sequent like frequent, i think uh it might be sequent like frequent anyway. I got in touch with them and they said that the watch is still very much in development and firmware upgrades will improve the accuracy. Meanwhile, in the few days that i’ve been testing the supercharger, the automatic charging seemed to work very, very well. The charges reliably stayed at 95 or more. I ordered the version of this watch that doesn’t monitor your heart rate, because i can’t really see the point. My heart only has two settings that i’m interested in on or off. Both models connect to your smartphone gps, to record your route, and that worked very well when i tried it, but again other than mild. Curiosity, when i’m out on a new walk, i can’t see myself using it very often, i suppose, if you’re one of those people who likes to run at times other than when you’re being chased by an angry hippopotamus, the heart rated root recording, might be interesting, but It’S not for me, so all in all, despite its teething problems, i’m sticking with the supercharger 2 for the moment, it’s a bit thicker than i would probably like, but otherwise i really like the design it’s very easy to read at a glance, and i like the Fact that i never have to charge it, but until they crack the problem with the pedometer it’s, not so much a smart watch as a watch.
I bought this one for about 150 pounds on kickstarter they’re, not on general sale yet but they’ll probably cost more. Like double that, when they do i’ll keep wearing this one and updating the firmware and if the pedometer starts working properly i’ll post an update in the comments below meanwhile i’ve been arlo guthrie till the next time.yes9Pw9DeEg
