The first impression is that phone watch is the quality is quite good.  The body of the watch is pretty sturdy and the strap was quite flexible, unlike some I’ve bought before which was quite stiff.

First thing I did was insert a Starhub prepaid SIM card into it and charge it overnight. Next day, I started trying out the main functions that I bought the watch form, namely:

1.  As a phone replacement to make and receive calls

2.  Play music to be TWS earbuds

Secondary features which I wanted to test was it’s health related functions such HR monitor, Blood Pressure Monitor and Oximeter.

There are many other standard functions like pedometer, sports monitoring, which I will not cover here.

 As a Phone

First thing I tried is to test it out as a phone. I tried calling my wife and had her initiate a call to me. The phone was able to make outgoing calls as well as receive incoming calls without issues. The call quality isn’t great, but it’s good enough to communicate clearly. It comes with a keypad that is a little small for people with big fingers like me, but I can still manage.

 As a Music Player

I installed Spotify on the phone and was able to pair with my TWS earbuds and play Ed Sheeren and it sounds as good as playing it from my Huawei P10. So This is definitely a plus. Only thing to note is that I could not find a way to upload my music files from my computer to the watch. So you’d probably need a streaming app to use the watch as your music source. It comes with Youtube so I guess you can stream from Youtube if you don’t have a Spotify subscription.

Now for the secondary functions.

Heart Rate and Blood Pressure

One of the reasons I bought this watch was it’s claim that it can measure your Heart Rate, Blood Pressure, and Oxygen levels. I took a few readings and my conclusions are:

Heart Rate Monitor: Reasonably accurate. I compared with my Garmin Fenix 5 and the readings were pretty close

Blood Pressure: I don’t have a proper blood pressure meter to compare, but knowing what my blood pressure is from doctor’s visit, I’d say the blood pressure measurement was quite off. It showed a reading of 97 over 64. I know for sure that is too low, so take it with a pinch of salt. As the product description put it, it’s a reference, not a medical device. So I guess if my reading of 97 would be my baseline.I’d get worried if it shot to 120 since 97 is my normal reading.

Oximeter: It shows around 97%. Again, I don’t have a proper oximeter, but but will update this post if I finally get one. So for the time being, it’s again just a baseline to monitor, but in this pandemic where oxygen level is a key factor of your health, it’s still nice to have some baseline to compare with.

So for US$100+, this phone watch is a pretty neat device with quite a few functions. I’ve tried some other apps, but noticed that it required permissions to run, which I cannot find a way to set on the phone. So although it’s an Android phone, it may not run your applications if you need to set specific permissions for it to run.

But it’s a worthwhile buy for me since I plan to use it in the gym so I don’t have to bring my mobile phone to the gym to exercise and listen to my music.