Tagged “watches”

CMF Watch Pro

Last week, I did an experiment with /e/OS on a Pixel 6 Pro and in the process I also wanted to use some CMF accessories with it. That part was driven by how impressed I was with the CMF Buds Pro (have a look at my headphones page for more) at their price point so I thought the watch might also be great.

Sidebar, apparently there’s also a CMF phone en route.

Let’s dive right in.

The CMF Watch Pro (Amazon affiliate link) is a $70 “smart” watch with an incredible battery life and basic biometrics. That price is just a hair more than some of the other Chinese brands (TOZO, for example, makes a comparable watch a touch cheaper), and it’s a bit under something like a Ticwatch. It’s well under the cost of a new Apple / Samsung / Pixel Watch as well.

Some facts about this thing at a glance:

• 10+ Day Battery Life (I wore it for close to 11 days before I charged it at 10%, though I wasn’t using all the continuous monitoring).

• IP68 Water/Dust Rating

• Bluetooth 5.3

• Biometrics: Heart Rate, “Stress”, Blood Oxygen

• GPS?

• Swappable Watch Band (which I wore too tightly and got a small abrasion wound from)

• Use the watch as a microphone and speaker for phone calls.

• I definitely did not do this. I hate phone calls.

• No NFC, so no payments (unlikely at this price point)

The design and finish of the watch is really nice, it looks good on the wrist and it’s generally comfortable unless you’re me and you pull the band too tight (or have a propensity to put your face on your arm during sleep). The size of the watch face is great.

Connecting the watch is pretty standard compared to other watches. There’s a companion app you need to install on both Android and iOS which needs to run in the background for many of the functions. The app lets you download new watch faces, change settings, and pretty much what you’d expect.

I’ve read about many people having issues keeping the watch connected, but I had no issue with that. I never noticed the connection drop the entire time I was using it.

I liked a lot of the experience, but there were also many weird minor issues that make me appreciate the Apple Watch more.

Overall, there were a lot of good points to the watch when comparing it to something outside of its price category (an Apple Watch series 6, which you can get refurbished for around $120), not least of which was the battery life. It is super annoying that I have to charge my Apple Watch every night before I go to bed. Not having to charge a watch for over a week is outstanding.

Biometrics seemed to work very well compared to my normal experience on the Series 6: My resting heart rate is measuring within 5 bpm on the two platforms, as do longer walks. The Blood Oxygen also seems to measure the same (though accuracy of that overall can be a little hard to measure - still good in a pinch). I don’t know how to qualitatively measure what “stress” means to the CMF watch, but apparently I’m not too stressed about.

All the other basic features also work as you’d expect. You can:

• Set alarms from the watch and they go off at the right time.

• Set timers!

• See the weather (but only for today, and it only updates every 3 hours).

• Do some exercises, which use the GPS to track the activity when you’re outdoors.

• Control your music player.

• See notifications!

As MKBHD mentions in his Youtube Review, it’s essentially just a basic bluetooth extension with your phone. It’s a fine watch, and I wouldn’t really mind wearing it around for a while, though there are some things I’d miss. We’ll get to that in a second. First let’s talk about the problems I had.

The biggest issue by far is the utter lack of multitasking. For example, if you start a workout, you can no longer control your music player from the watch. Same deal with the timer. You must keep the timer app running, otherwise it’ll stop the timer. It’s a major problem for doing any of those things on the watch.

Like, if you’re on a run, I guess you can use the touch controls on your earbuds, but I frequently use the watch to adjust stuff when I’m on a regular walk.

Speaking of workouts, I could never get it to find the GPS before I started the workout. Every time I just had to skip the connection and continue. I do think the GPS did eventually connect, because it showed an accurate path when I reviewed the workout later.

Another thing that was “fine” but was pretty annoying was the lack of auto brightness. If I had the watch at the lowest brightness, and then went out into the sun, getting the brightness to the place where I could properly see the screen was difficult.

The last “major” thing I encountered was one of the things that makes the watch look really nice: the sharp corners. You see, I tend to put my head on my hand when I’m sleeping, and I kept essentially stabbing myself in the face with the edges while I was asleep. That’s not something that happens with the rounded corners on the Apple Watch.

So let’s talk about some things that I missed which made me appreciate the Apple Watch after running through this experiment.

At the price of the CMF Watch Pro, I don’t expect it to have these things, but I definitely notice stuff I took for granted on more expensive smart watches.

So besides the fact that multitasking is kind of essential for me when I want to work out and listen to music, or set a timer, there were a couple of things that I missed out on.

Tap-to-pay was probably the thing that was the biggest “loss” of not using my Apple Watch. I have my transit card connected to Apple Pay, so in order to get on the bus or take a train, I would need to either tap a credit card, or go buy a physical transit card. Not a huge deal, but enough that I missed it (to the point where I brought the Apple watch with me to avoid having to buy a plastic card).

The other thing was the lack of automatic activity tracking. I regularly forget to start a workout, but the Apple Watch has my back and will alert me to start the activity. Sometimes it nags me several times in a row. This leads to tracking more workouts properly. The CMF watch does not do this so you have to be diligent to start it if you want to track it in real time / with GPS.

… And auto brightness. Definitely auto brightness.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised with the “premium basic” watch experience while also testing out /e/OS, and also pleasantly surprised that it connected just fine and had no issues when loading the app on a de-googled phone.

If you’re just in the market for something that’s very basic, and can live with the no-multitasking, I think the CMF Watch Pro is a great option for the price.

I had a fair amount of fun trying this out, so I may try out some other low-price watches in the future, we’ll see.

03 Jul 2024 by cthos

reviews reviews watches tech