Com and today i’m reviewing the futuristic ultra slick, nubia watch. The nubia watch comes filled with contradictions. Well, it combines a cutting edge, flexible display with equally bendy glass, it’s, also a generation behind on its internal components and offers limited health and fitness tracking. So should you buy a nubia watch at 219 dollars, it’s the cheapest flexible display smart watch and the least expensive cellular enabled smart watch around, but it’s limited app selection means it’s not for everyone. So that leaves the question. Who is the nubia watch for think of the nubia watch as basically like a candy bar phone that offers some degree of health and fitness tracking? So if you’re looking to go cell phone, free and don’t need messaging apps like whatsapp or facebook, then the nubia watch might be for you. So here’s a little bit about myself. I’Ve been a fanatical user of fitness wearables since 2014 having gone hands on with most major brands at conventions or through review units in pre viral times, like most tech, loving gym rats, i analyzed every cardio and weightlifting session with fitness trackers in the post viral era. The gym closers led to me to work out from home and unfortunately, without exercise machines. I now do mostly pilates resistance band sessions and the rare hike, but even given my limited workout routines, the nubia watch just didn’t meet my needs, even though it’s not for me. I had to appreciate the watch’s, aesthetic design and physical robustness at around 98 grams in weight it’s the heaviest smart watch that i’ve ever tested, but that’s, because it uses a combination of aluminum and steel.
In fact, much of the band itself is composed of aluminum metal, which is screwed into place with steel pins. You can see that the sides of the watch can flex at about a 20 to 30 degree angle that’s, particularly impressive, because it uses a special, flexible class display. The glass display is framed with a combination of aluminum and steel and while while the glass scratches easily as far as glass, goes it’s still difficult to scratch, because there’s a raised bezel overall, the watch is well designed and super futuristic. Looking the uh setup and configuration are also easy. First install the nubia ware app, which is available on ios and android, and please note that, despite its name, the nubia watch does not use google’s wearable operating system wear os. Instead, it uses a custom variation of android and that’s likely, six or seven so anyway. After installing the app a guided setup process launches on your phone, you’ll use your phone camera to pair via qr code to the watch and then the nubia uh, where app requests a variety of permissions after you’ve completed the setup process. The watch is then ready for use. The nubia watch, like all smart watches, can turn its display on all day long. If you don’t have ambient display turned on, you can enable gesture control for toggling the screen on and off with gesture controls enabled to turn the screen on. You simply bring your your arm up in the twisting motion as if to check the time and switching the screen off just involves pinching the screen.
The screen off gesture is unique among smart watches and makes excellent use of its gigantic flexible oled display, provided you have an enabled 24 7 ambient display. The battery life is pretty good if worn all day long. The watch loses about a quarter of its battery life overnight, with all features except ambient display turned on, while in active use it loses. It loses about half of its battery life within a 24 hour period. However, the battery life varied throughout the test period and in one instance, it lost a full charge overnight. I rate the battery endurance at around two days, that’s about twice as long compared to a wear os smart watch. If that watch has all the features turned on, i imagine that with all features turned off and the device left idle, the watch would get nubia’s estimated seven days of battery life, but who leaves their smart watch idle for seven days but overall by wear os standards. The battery life is amazing, but compared to the high bar set by fitbit it’s average at best. Even so, the nubia watch’s battery endurance will probably last longer than your phone and considering that there’s, a miniature phone inside of the nubia watch, provided you have a paired bluetooth, headset. That is pretty good, so for sleep tracking, the nubia watch isn’t great, but it offers similar accuracy compared to a fitbit. With one big issue and before i get to the big problem, let me explain how it’s sleep tracking works.
Uh. You just wear the watch to bed and the nubia watch begins automatically tracking your sleep, which it breaks down into light sleep, wake and what it refers to as deep sleep. Unfortunately, that brings us to the big problem. The nubia watch doesn’t actually track deep sleep, confusingly nubia classified rem. Sleep is deep sleep. Let me demonstrate with a graphic when the nubia watch’s results are compared side by side side by side to the fitbit. You can see that they are similar in accuracy. Although nubia classified rem, sleep as deep sleep and it doesn’t actually seem to register deep sleep and while it accurately seems to log wakefulness rem and light sleep, it’s missing one of the two most important sleep states, in other words you’re getting about half the the tracker That a fitbit is, and then on top of that you don’t get any useful analysis of that data. Overall, sleep tracking is worse compared to its competitors. So, while sleep tracking isn’t great one area in which the nubia watch absolutely shines is as a portable music player, so let’s say you want to track a workout and listen to music at the same time, but do not want to take a bulky smartphone with you On a run or to the gym, if gyms were still open, we’re speaking in purely hypothetical terms, i’d argue that the nubia watch is the best looking and most cost effective option ever made. If you just transfer your music files from a computer to the nubia watch, and then you enable file transfers on the watch and then pair blue bluetooth, earbuds directly to the watch, you can then uh go on a jog or work out without worrying about missing a Call or text message and log your fitness metrics at the same time, and while the the fitness metrics aren’t amazing, the built in gps, can tell you exactly how far you’ve run.
Unfortunately, there are other problems with the nubia watch that limit its usefulness. For example, it has an ingress protection rating of 5’4, which means it’s not fully watertight and lacks dust resistance against fine particulate matter like sand. I also tried numerous times to get bluetooth file, transfers working but could never even get to the point of initiating a file. Transfer, wirelessly and i’ve already mentioned it, but there is no app ecosystem, so you can’t install any third party apps. So should you buy a nubia watch, it’s a solid device for a very specific niche, it’s great for people who want to go phone free to the gym or on a run? If you need something more like in depth, fitness or sleep tracking, there are far better devices out there and that’s it for this review for a full length review.mkBSJlvCTyY
