Smart watches are still a popular type of device; they do not catch up with fitness trackers in sales due to the price, but they are confidently fighting for the wrists of users. The same can be said about Chinese manufacturers. While the lion’s share of purchased smartwatches belongs to Apple production, the other cumulative part belongs to a number of Chinese brands. Which, it should be noted, continue to raise the bar for the quality and “sanity” of the interface. We were asked to prepare a review of BlackView smartwatches, a brand known for rugged smartphones.
The BlackView W60 watch became the same, receiving protection from dust and moisture, as well as falls from a height. They have several more features that, in principle, are rarely found in wearable devices. 
Whether the watch is worth your attention and whether it can compete with slightly more popular competitors – we’ll find out.
Design and ergonomics
BlackView W60 resembles the brand’s smartphones, and has their two main signature features – protection and good battery life.
The massive sports-style body has a metal frame protruding above the screen along the perimeter. In addition, the case is protected from moisture and dust. It is also stated that he is not afraid of shocks when falling from a height of five meters. You can also immerse the watch under water, but no deeper than 10 meters, but we would play it safe and limit ourselves to snorkeling at a depth of 1-2 meters.
As a result of the capacious battery, the watch has a fairly thick case, but not so thick as to spoil the appearance. They look organic on a large male hand. Compared to more expensive protected watches from another brand, they look decent.
The watch has only three buttons. Two on the right side are for controlling the clock and one orange is on the left.
By the icon on it you can understand that it turns on the flashlight, and not just a screen with a white picture at maximum brightness, but a full-fledged LED built into the case. It is located at the top end. It’s really convenient if you need to highlight something – the under-bed area, the engine compartment, the inside of a cabinet.
There is a microphone hole at the bottom end. Yes, the watch can broadcast your voice to your smartphone after a call is received on its screen. On the right side, closer to the inside, there is a speaker slot.
Biometric sensors are usually located on the inside of the watch case. There are optical sensors that measure pulse and blood oxygen saturation. Just above them there are contacts for charging. It is magnetic to the case quite reliably, so you can put the watch in your pocket on a hike and not be afraid that the charging will turn off. If only you have to charge it at all, since the battery lasts for a month with normal use.
The strap is made of silicone and is moderately hard. It has a standard mount, width 22 mm. So you can buy alternative options that do not necessarily fit this model. The inner part adjacent to the body is softer and silky. The outer one has a textured texture. The length is more than enough for large diameter brushes. The set also includes a fabric version of the bracelet format.
Three colors of the strap and the plastic part of the case – black like ours, as well as gray and khaki. The metal frame on top is the same color throughout.
Equipment and settings
Display
The BlackView W60 watch has a rectangular display with rounded corners. It is large, with a diagonal of 2 inches and a resolution of 280×320 pixels. The display has a protective coating. During a week of test wear, no scratches appeared and it withstood a couple of minor blows.
The picture and interface elements would look nicer with a higher resolution, but again there is no particularly big discomfort. It’s just that some elements look “broken” and not very smooth. Although the Latin fonts and most of the graphics are neat.
We would call the screen brightness excessive. We cannot verify the declared figure of 1000 nits, but in fact, even on a sunny day, the minimum backlight level is sufficient. This is especially noticeable at night, when even at minimum brightness the screen is too bright. Maybe that’s why there is no light sensor, but it would be useful if the backlight level was more optimal. In the menu you can only find a scale of 5 brightness level values and select them manually.
It seems like it’s not worth talking about the quality of color reproduction in smartwatches, but there are nuances. Despite the fact that the liquid crystal matrix can perfectly reproduce colors, here the graphic elements are somehow overly bright and overexposed. Although the dials and indicator graphs display red, green and blue well. Perhaps this is all the result of the same problem of excessive display brightness.
Sensors
A bluetooth module is used to connect and work as a headset. The manufacturer decided to clarify even which one specifically – Actions ATS3085L. It supports the economical mode of operation of this protocol and in fact does not eat up the battery, at least we will actually get the declared autonomy figures.
The VC30F sensor is responsible for measuring heart rate. If you Google it, you can find what other smart watch models and even smart rings are equipped with it. In practice, we got approximately the same numbers as other smartwatches. That is, we can talk about accuracy in terms of the error of optical sensors. With them, according to measurements of the VO2 heart rate zone, you allegedly do not reach. The bad thing is that in fact, during training, you still feel that the pulse is not 130-150, but all 180, but optical sensors cannot show this to you.
It is unlikely that this module includes a sensor for measuring oxygen saturation, because on the manufacturer’s website only pulse measurement is clearly indicated. So what pulse oximeter measures SpO2 is an open question.
Software
The BlackView W60 watch menu has many settings for the appearance of menu items, four screens that open by swiping in different directions from the dial, hundreds of sports and standard smart device capabilities.
Bicycles in different rooms and styles, as well as running, swimming, active sports – about a hundred in total. From these, you can select the appropriate ones in the activity menu and place them at the beginning of the list. Then you won’t have to go through a long list before starting the workout.
Program list layout options
There is a stopwatch, timer, compass, calculator, media player control, alarm clock, weather. There is also a pedometer that shows the distance traveled in steps and kilometers. There is sleep monitoring and a history of oxygen saturation indicators.
From the watch, you can initiate a phone call by selecting an imported contact (100 in total) or selecting a name from recent calls. SMS, email and instant messengers can be read from the watch and then deleted from the inbox history. You can select a default SMS response template and send it from your watch.
The watch can also work as a Bluetooth headset for a smartphone. To do this, the green phone button must be pressed in quick settings.
If girls like this watch design, there is also a women’s health calendar, as marketers call it.
You can talk about the functions as much as you like, but smart watches are greeted by their dials.
BlackView W60 has more than a hundred designs. Usually there are digital, analog, hybrid and graphic. We can’t say that we found any particularly beautiful or ergonomic ones, but several options are quite tolerable. There are a dozen pre-installed on the watch, the rest are downloaded from the application.
15 watch interface languages are supported and the manufacturer’s website lists Ukrainian as well. Not really. Moreover, in the list of flags on the website there is a Ukrainian one, but it is no longer listed in the list. Although the other 16 of… 15 languages are registered. Marketing…
No support for any of languages? Well, don’t lie in graphic form
GloryFitPro
We followed the original writing of the application, which in addition to the dials, has four more tabs:
- Home page – current physical indicators are summarized.
- Sports screen – starts training for the selected activity.
- Device – where the same watch skins are selected and settings for notifications, access to contacts and applications are made, and the firmware is updated. In the App reminder list, you can select which programs to receive notifications from, and below there is an add icon, through which you can enable other installed applications.
- On the My (Me) screen, profile data, training schedule and access to third-party programs. Access to third-party services, that is, export of data anywhere else, is only available from the Chinese WeRun. And this is, perhaps, the main drawback – you cannot export data to something more popular here – Strava, for example.
Battery
In terms of battery life, the BlackView W60 was very, very surprising. Some manufacturers are fighting for additional hours of work beyond the day. Others silently install faded but economical screens and get 20-25 days. Still others offer 7-9 days with GPS or a couple of weeks in “vegetable” mode – when only the time is shown and steps are counted.
And BlackView installed a colorful and bright screen, although not super-accurate in color reproduction, and a normal battery and offered a minimum of 30 days. And this is with occasional training with GPS turned on. And if you use the W60 exclusively as a watch, you can reach more than three months. – 100 days.
There is a 900 mAh battery installed here, which is very capacious by watch standards. And it doesn’t take that long to charge – 2.5 hours to reach 100%. So you can safely use a flashlight, turn on GPS during training and not deny yourself anything. Autonomy is a very strong point of this watch and it in no way spoiled its appearance or “squeezed out” other equipment with the size of the battery.
Impressions
The BlackView W60 smartwatch has become another successful symbiosis of good protection, autonomy and popular functions of wearable devices. They can definitely offer more than other Chinese smartwatches, and in a number of parameters they are head and shoulders above them.
They have everything you need for daily use as a fitness tracker and personal assistant. Sometimes even offering unnecessary opportunities. Rather than remembering everything that is in them, it is easier to say what is missing from them – fineradjustment of screen brightness and export to various sports programs, and not just to the servers of the Celestial Empire.
Neat and high-quality assembly, good battery life, a design that is normal for rugged devices, and a non-intrusive software interface – all this became the key to the fact that we can recommend this watch for purchase. A couple of shortcomings can be corrected programmatically or they can be completely neglected.
BlackView W60 smart watch characteristics
| Display: | 2.01” TFT, 280×320, 1000 nits |
| Navigation: | Bluetooth 5.3 LE, GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo |
| Autonomy: |
|
| Sensors: |
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| Moisture and dust protection: | IP68 |
| Shock protection: | yes, 10ATM |
| Additional: | built-in flashlight |
| Battery: | 900 mAh |
| Dimensions: | 50×44.5×250 mm |
| Weight: | 61 g |
| Supplier: | Shop BlackView on Aliexpress |
| Price: | $25 |
Rating:
+ autonomy
+ built-in flashlight
+ build quality
+ protection
+ set of sensors
+ price
-no light sensor
-export training only to the WeRun program
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