Smart home tech company Wyze has announced a feature-rich fitness tracker that costs just $20.
The Wyze Watch is available for pre-order today, and will ship from February 2021.
A $20 price encourages low expectations, but the Wyze Watch has an almost baffling amount of tech and hardware considering the cost. It has a 1.75-inch LCD screen — more like that of a smartwatch than a budget fitness tracker — an aluminium frame rather than a plastic one and a blood oxygen saturation sensor.
Wyze’s Watch comes in two sizes, 44mm and 47mm, and the smaller version has a 1.4-inch screen. Wyze claims the watch lasts up to nine days between charges, and its optical HR sensor will keep an eye on your heart rate 24/7.
This is a little less of a departure for Wyze than it may initially appear, as the Watch can be used to control the company’s existing smart home gear over Bluetooth. Wyze makes home security cameras and a thermostat, and it released a basic fitness tracker earlier this year, the $25 Wyze Band.
Still, a Wyze Watch will count your steps like a normal fitness tracker, and the data can be sync’d with either Google Fit or Apple Health. It can also receive notifications from apps including Gmail, WhatsApp and Instagram.
What are the drawbacks? The Wyze Watch is only water resistant to 2 meters, or IP68, not the 5ATM some rivals offer.
And as the screen uses an LCD panel rather than an OLED one, there’s unlikely to be an “always on” watch display option.
The Wyze Watch also lacks GPS and there’s no mention of full activity tracking, where you might, for example, manually start tracking a run rather than letting the watch passively count your steps. It won’t replace a Garmin, but to expect that for $20 is unrealistic.
At the time of writing the Wyze site suggests it has sold over 38,000 Watches. And as the $20 offer is listed as a “pre-order” price, you can expect the cost to rise when the pre-order allocation has run out. A leather strap accessory is available for $10.
