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The Hindu
The Hindu
Lifestyle
Sweta Akundi

Noise ColorFit NAV review: Inexpensive buy for fitness buffs

The Noise ColorFit Nav smartwatch (Source: special arrangement)

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How do I know Noise ColorFit NAV’s heart rate monitor works accurately?

My resting heart rate went up from 66 beats per minute to a constant 85 throughout the duration of Indian Matchmaking’s first episode, as I side-eyed my parents expecting a ‘You know, Sima is right’ remark from them at any moment.

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Made-in-India name Noise calls the ColorFit NAV its best offering so far and its fitness tracking matches the claim. It comes with 10 workout modes and monitors the time for which you have remained active, the distance you have covered, the steps you have taken, and the calories you have burnt.

Connect to the NoiseFit X app via your phone’s bluetooth and it will store this data, giving you a useful graph of your daily, weekly and monthly activity levels. The watch has built in GPS, so if you keep it connected to your phone and go for a run outside, you can see a map of your run. I did get caught in the rain once while wearing this, but the IP68 water resistance did its job well.

The watch has multiple faces, including one which you can customise. I played around with all of them, but none did anything to lift its rubber-strap look. The 1.4 inch LCD display looks sharp inside but I found it difficult to read outside in the sun, despite setting my brightness to maximum. The battery drains in just four days of extensive use, but with light use it stays for a week easily.

Specifications
  • Dimension & weight: 38.5 x 42.5 x 11.0 mm ; 40 g
  • Watch case material: Polycarbonate
  • System requirement: iOS 9 and higher, or Android 5 and higher
  • Bluetooth: v4.2
  • Display: 1.4-inch thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT LCD) ; 320 x 320 pixels
  • Sensors: Accelerometer Sensor, Gyroscope Sensor, Optical Heart Rate Sensor, Capacitive Sensor, in-built GPS
  • Health monitoring features: Heart Rate Monitor, Step Tracker, Calories Burned, Distance Travelled, Activity History, Sleep Monitor, Breathe, Sports Mode

In a connected world

Noise encourages you to keep your phones away, through its smartwatches. How feasible is it while you are Working From Home all the time? Let us see.

You can control music on your phone so you don’t need to reach out to change your workout songs. You can reject calls, but without a text message. It notifies you every time you get an SMS or a WhatsApp or any social media notification.

There is an option to use quick replies but only via SMS, not WhatsApp. (Who even uses SMS to converse anymore?) And if you have multiple WhatsApp messages from one person or on a group, you can only see the last text, so that is not much use, is it?

Even if that were fixed, the constant notifications on your phone leave your wrist vibrating. If I wanted to keep my phone away, I would do so without the notifications alerts. It is not like I can do anything about these notifications other than reaching out for my phone again.

While on the one hand it increases my stress level with this, on the other — well actually, on the same — hand, it wants to help me ‘breathe better’ by gently guiding me to inhale and exhale. Personally, I have no inclination to be that Pavlovian.

The Noise ColorFit NAV smartwatch retails for ₹ 4,499 at gonoise.com and at Amazon India.

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