so as well as the standard smartphone shenanigans this week’s big shiny poco launch saw the chinese manufacturer spaff out its very first smartwatch this watch right here in fact which i’ve had strapped to my arm for just over a week now the simply titled poco watch boasts some premium specs and features including a punchy amoled screen all the usual fitness tracking tools including built-in gps support and some please and battery life all packed into this weeny wrist size device so is the pocket watch a smarter cheaper alternative to the samsung watch apple watch yada yada well here’s my full in-depth poker watch review and for more on the latest and greatest deck please do poke subscribe and ding that notifications bell cheers so first i’ve got to say that i really love how the poker watch sports a decidedly asexual design oh hang on where that’s not the right term at all because that would suggest that this watch doesn’t and let me tell you the poker watch definitely it pretty hard what i meant was it’s not really gender specific because that compact lightweight finish will suit more feminine wrists like my own as well as big old burly man arms this is easily one of the skinniest smartwatches i’ve reviewed in recent times measuring just under a centimeter at its thickest point while the 31 gram weight including the strap means you won’t even feel it when it’s stuck to you 24 hours a day there’s only a small number of color options available at launch for the poco watch and if you’re not too tempted by this standard
black model your other choices are basically blue or ivory swirl on earth is the bright yellow version like bright yellow being the color that everyone immediately associates with poco i mean look even the box for the poker watch is incredibly yellow who knows maybe that’ll come later and certainly the poker watch seems rugged enough so far i’ve bashed that matte chassis and that display off plenty of work surfaces on the edge of my desk a good few times this past week as you can see there there’s subtle sticky out bezels to actually protect the display and touchwood so far still perfectly scratch free and the poker watch is blissfully comfortable to wear all day long every day as well helped along by the extremely lightweight design thankfully seems to be a good quality silicon style strap as well i’ve had absolutely no rashes or skanky skin issues after a full week of having it slapped on my wrist and the buckle watch like many small watches these days even the more budget-friendly ones is water resistant down to a depth of five atmospheres so in other words if you want to go snorkeling or you know just leave it on when you’re in the swimming pool it does a full swim tracking as well but more on that in a bit now setting up the poco watch was so simple that even a jordy could do it with minimal help from his mates all you need to do is download the me fitness app onto your smartphone it’s available on the google play store and also the apple app store and then in just a minute or two you can get your small watch paired to your smartphone using bluetooth 5.0 the me fitness app is pretty comprehensive so you’ve got all kinds of different settings and features that you can play
around with here via the app so for instance you can change up the watch face again more on that in a bit you can set up your app notifications so every time one of these apps receives a notification your watch will buzz and give you a brief preview and you can switch this on or off for basically every app on your smartphone comprehensive coverage you also have access to all of your health monitoring features via the app as well so for instance you can see whether you want that 24 hour a day heart rate monitoring by default it’ll take a reading every half an hour so which i think is perfectly fine but you can if you want to have a reading taken every single minute of the day the old spo2 measurements the blood oxygen levels it doesn’t take automatic readings throughout the day only while you’re asleep if you want to per usual stress tracking sleep tracking and then if you want to you can have your pocket watch occasionally annoy you by buzzing your wrist and telling you to get off your arse and stop eating pork scratchings and watching homes under the hammer you can also select your favorite workout spin here as well so just get rid of any stuff you’re highly unlikely to do which for in my case is basically all of this stuff there’s plenty of other sense you can play around with and from within here you can also update the poker watch now the poker watchers 1.6 inch amoled display is an absolute view to easily rivaling the screens that you’ll find on most other premium price small watches the 360 by 320 pixel resolution
means those visuals are supremely crisp so you can easily read all of the tiny text as long as your peepers are up to it of course and of course you’ve got all the other advantages of oled displays including sharp contrast you’ve got some really nice vivid poppy colors there and super wide viewing angles as well so you can just surreptitiously glance at your watch from an angle and still clearly see what the time is etc and the poker watch does support an auto brightness feature as well so it gets reasonably dim in the evenings and then when you skip your way merrily down the high street on a sunny day it does boost that brightness all the way up i got no complaints with the peak brightness everything was perfectly legible even when the sun did decide to shine and of course because it is an amoled display that also means you get the always on display option if you don’t want to be constantly raising your wrist in a dramatically over exaggerated manner in order to see what the time is etc and while that display isn’t quite edge to edge exactly the bezels surrounding it aren’t exactly super chunky so not too much to complain about and like xiaomi’s smart watches you’ve got a respectable selection of watch faces to choose between not a massive number pre-installed as you can see there you can easily jump online grab some new ones including some poco specific efforts so even if you can’t have a bright yellow smart watch at least you can turn the screen bright yellow so there you go poco passionate powerful cool fast young fun i’m not entirely sure about young fun that does sound a little bit jimmy
savalesque as always you’ve got a choice of mechanical ones digital analog and a variety of cartoony style ones as well if you’re more into that they are undeniably cute unfortunately you can’t customize a lot of the elements on most of these uh watch faces so for instance you can’t see it i don’t want a battery meter i just want today’s actual date please now it’s no massive shock that the ui here on the uh the poco watch is very similar to the one you’ll find on the xiaomi watches like the watch s1 which i recently reviewed because of course the bonds between xiaomi and poko are clearly still very strong indeed as usual you can turn on your watch with just a quick tap of this little button here otherwise there is a reason to wake feature as well this takes you into your main watch face if you flick left and right that’s how you access all of your pockel watch widgets and these are the standard affairs likes of your heart rate monitoring you’ve got your spo2 levels exercise tracking and of course a brief overview of how many steps you’ve taken how many active hours you’ve had etc media controls in there as well if there’s any you don’t like you can just dive into the widgets section on the me fitness settings and get rid of them you can also add in sleep and stress tracking and just as with the xiaomi watch the ui is slightly reversed here on the pocket watch compared with a lot of competitors where os watches etc because you have to swipe up in order to access your settings and toggles and then swipe down to access notifications the notification support is pretty basic unfortunately here on the poco watch like a lot of watches that aren’t an apple watch or aware os watch all you
can do is get a brief preview of what’s ticked through and unfortunately that’s it you can’t delete the message you can’t respond to it uh unfortunately sod all so yeah the notification sport may be pretty basic on the poco watch but i had no issues with the sync in between my smartwatch and my smartphone the s22 every time i got a notification on that phone my wrist would immediately buzz about half a second later if that even likewise not a huge selection of toggles here on the poker watch either you’ve got your usual do not disturb mode torch mode you can set an alarm and you can also dive into the main smartwatch settings this replicates a lot of the settings that you’ll find in the me fitness app including the ability to switch watch faces you’ve got do not disturb more you’ve got your workouts turn on the always on display so exactly how long the screen wakes up for you can also set the vibration intensity via the pocket watch settings and let me tell you even on the default settings that was certainly strong enough to attract my attention it’s a very eager little buzz it is and then back at the main watch face you can tap that side button again to access your apps menu and yes it is a small selection of apps here on the pocket watch not really expandable at all you don’t have a proper dedicated app store but you do have all the basics covered often including stopwatches timers got a compass etc and of course yes breathing exercises we do love a good breathing exercise complete with again some serious rumble support unfortunately when it comes to performance not
exactly super smooth here on the poker watch this is clearly one of the areas where poko is going to scale things back a bit in order to reach a lower asking price occasionally when the watch first wakes up it can take a moment or so after you swipe the screen before something actually happens like it’s just had one too many whiskey sours and needs that extra bit of thinking time before actually taking action in particular scrolling through your notifications list feels very lethargic indeed it just takes a lot of swiping to actually get through there and everything’s a bit sort of stuttery i did notice the occasional little quirk as well so for instance sometimes when i was flicking through the widgets it would just quickly for a split second flash back to the main watch face before actually cutting to the widget that i was trying to swipe to but you know the time i’m shooting this video the poker watch is still pre-launched let alone pre-release so hopefully these little bugs will be squashed before it actually hits stores and while i am griping about stuff there’s also no built-in mic or speaker here on the poco watch so no assistant support no ability to take calls via the watch etc and also if you happen to be into your fitness she’s well as long as you’re not expecting hardcore support here just more casual exercise tracking then you and the poker watch should get on absolutely
fine the likes of the whole ear tracking seems perfectly accurate certainly compared with any other smartwatch that i’ve tested recently and then if you want to actually track an exercise you can either swipe to the widget and begin it that way otherwise you can also do it via the apps menu and yes the pocket watch does support a hundred plus fitness modes covering most of the usual on flapping ass jiggling ways that people try and burn off all of that saggy flabby waste stuff we’ve got some pretty obscure stuff in here some very niche things like artistic swimming for instance and good old paddle boarding which seems quite popular these days although i still maintain that you can’t do that without looking like an utter knob and so just finished a boxing training session this is so you can see the fitness tracking in full swing as you can see you can see exactly how long you’ve been going for your current heart rate calories burned as well if you’re interested in a bit of that if you swipe this way you can pause or end your workout and if you swipe the other way you can play around with whatever podcast or music you’re listening to to really get you going video controls work absolutely flawlessly and then when you are finished as i say you can also just hold down the side button if your fingers are a bit too sweaty to actually operate the screen and then you’re given an overview of exactly uh what you managed to accomplish including a reasonably accurate killer calorie count your heart rate throughout and also at the end of you leave it once you can see your recovery rate you can see exactly uh what categories you fit into aerobic respiration anaerobic etc and then the information is
immediately synced with the me fitness app so you can uh check out your workout in retrospective as well and the bokeh watch also boasts built-in gps support as well for three systems glonass galileo and then beardow baydu however you’re supposed to pronounce that one and it seems to do the job absolutely fine for you know just tracking a bit of a wonder down the street bit of a hike or whatever but if you are using it to track run and can’t vouch for it on that front unfortunately because do i look like i run for anything i mean if this house was burning down around me right now the best i could muster up is probably a half-hearted jog to the exit the sleep tracking as usual a little bit wishy-washy to be perfectly honest it didn’t quite recognize all the numerous times i was awake during the night last night for instance because i got some really solid sleep but to be fair it’s no worse than any other small watch out there you can also get a readout of your average heart rate as you had your bit of kip and then last step poco range you’ll get up to 14 days of battery life on a single charge of the poco watch but as always of course do take that estimate with a massive dose of salt because i personally found that once i turned on the always on display the 24-hour heart rate tracking and most of the other decent features notifications support of course as well i actually got closer to three to four days of use from a single charge of this bad boy especially if i actually made use of the exercise tracking once a day some of the apps you know the timer and the stopwatch and such forth so you know the poker watch isn’t as good as some rivals from likes of huawei and xiaomi but look at the size of this thing it’s absolutely teeny and the fact that it lasts i thought three to four days on a single charge that means you can charge it up before a long weekend away somewhere and not even have to worry about it taking the
you know the dinky little magnetic dock and it’s still a damp side better than most premium rivals like the apple watch the samsung watch which tend to last a day maybe two if you’re really really strict with how you use it sorry there in a nutshell is my review of the poco watch after using it’s my full-time smartwatch for a week and i do like quite a lot about it you know it’s a very nice slender lightweight small watch if you’re looking for something like that you’ve got quite dnt wrists like myself will certainly do the job there battery life in bad at all gorgeous display on this thing and it has most of the sort of standard small watch features including dedicated fitness tracking you’ve got a good selection of watch faces on there some decent customization but of course if you do want the option to download fresh apps and really expand the functionality of your smartwatch you also want that really smart notification support you will have to bump up your budget and go for something like a samsung watch and apple watch instead so that’s what i think anyway born about you guys be great to your thoughts down in the comments below please do poke subscribe and ding that notifications bell for more on the latest and greatest deck and have yourselves a bloody lovely the rest of the week cheers everyone love you
