Playfit Dial 3 review: Multiple compromises to make way for Bluetooth calling

The Playfit Dial 3 has a fairly minimalistic design overall and the black-coloured unit that I’m sent for review has a very discreet look. It will go along perfectly well with any outfit you wear. The body is metal and the strap has a nice texture to it on the outside which I loved. On the right is a single button that works as a back key. The watch is also quite light so you’ll forget you’re wearing it after a while. What I did not like was the fact that there are two to hold the strap in place, where one would have sufficed.

The Playfit Dial 3 is nearly a complete substitute for your smartphone for calls (Image: Zohaib Ahmed/Indian Express)

Coming to the display, the watch has a 1.8″ LCD panel. The pixel density is definitely not the best here and since the panel is LCD you can forget about deep blacks. But at least the watch is still quite bright and gets the job done outdoors thanks to 500nits brightness. I really liked the fact that the brightness slider is just a swipe away and doesn’t require you to rummage through several menus to get to it. The touch works expectedly for the most part but you’d want to press a lot harder than on your phone for the watch to register your touches properly. Lift to wake works perfectly well.

The main highlight of the watch, as apparent from its name, is its built-in calling features. If you’ve got your phone nearby, you won’t need to pick it up to send/receive calls at all as you can do that from the watch itself. The watch can store 8 contacts which you can call directly and even features a dial-pad for those who like to memorise numbers. During calls, the speakers can feel a bit shrill, but you do still hear the other party well.

I really liked how the menu is put together, allowing quick navigation (Image: Zohaib Ahmed/Indian Express)

I did not like the watch’s tendency to snatch the playback from the phone’s speakers every now and then. When watching a video with audio being fired from the phone’s speakers or a Bluetooth device, the phone kept switching the audio channel over to the watch, making me jump. There’s no way to disable this behaviour, and I tried using another phone just to be sure but saw no difference.

Fitness tracking works somewhat fine but your steps data can see random spikes, especially when you are commuting. When I set the watch up for the first time, the app started showing 24 steps in a few minutes despite me not having moved even a little. The Playfit app is rather slow to launch but works expectedly after it opens up.

The watch also comes with blood pressure monitoring, which I haven’t seen at this price point. My blood pressure stayed in the 120+/70+ range, which is healthy. However, weirdly, the watch continued measuring BP even when placed on the table, which led me to question the legitimacy of the feature. This behaviour was also observed with heart rate.

The Playfit Dial 3 can measure the BP of a table (Image: Zohaib Ahmed/Indian Express)

So should you buy this watch? You can but only if Bluetooth calling is absolutely essential to you. While the watch has a decent design, it seems to make severe compromises in other departments, like the display and fitness measurement sensors, which are a lot better on competing offerings.