Popglory Smart Watch Review – Full Touch Fitness Watch For Android & iOS For Men Women
China-based Popglory is a manufacturer of affordable smartwatches. Its flagship product is the P22 smartwatch, which is offered in North America and Europe. The watch is powered by a customized operating system with few functionality and long battery life.
Design & Build Excellence
The appearance of this watch appeals to me. The body is composed of metal and has a silver finish, giving it the appearance of the Apple Watch.
At 43g, it is rather light, and the casing and strap are well-balanced in terms of feel and sturdiness.
The watch was really easy to wear and would work for both men and women because it is much smaller than others in this price range.
The silicone rubber strap was also really comfy. The color options for the straps include pink, green, and black, among others. There is also a gold-finished case with the pink strap available.
With an IP67 classification, the watch can withstand immersion in water for up to one meter. I didn’t use it for swimming, but it did eliminate the need for me to wash my hands or worry about getting it wet in the shower.
Display
The watch sports a 1.4″ TFT color touchscreen with a 240×240 pixel resolution. There is a big bezel around the perimeter of the watch since the screen does not extend to the borders. The design is impacted by the bezel’s bottom border being bigger than the top.
While there are 5 brightness levels, I found the first 4 to be too dark and used full brightness throughout my testing. Despite so, the battery life was excellent, which I’ll discuss further below.
Despite the lack of an always-on display, the raise to wake feature of the watch performed well, typically bringing up the watch face within a few of seconds of elevating my wrist. Although you may change this setting in the app from 5 to 20 seconds, the watch is originally programmed to stay on for 5 seconds before clocking out.
Features
Let’s now examine the Popglory P22’s major characteristics. The watch uses Bluetooth 4.0, which is a bit older version than most smartwatches, to connect to your phone, but I had no trouble keeping the connection.
The watch features sensors to keep an eye on your blood pressure, heart rate, and blood oxygen levels. These sensors may be spot-checked through the main menu or turned on automatically during exercises (more on this below). Another choice is continuous heart rate monitoring, which will collect frequent readings.
The blood pressure and blood oxygen measures weren’t constant, so I’d dispute their accuracy even if the heart rate monitor appeared to be beneficial.
The media player and remote camera shutter, which are both available in the main menu, are additional features. The media player only allows for play/pause and back/forward navigation. Also, it is difficult to find because it is near the bottom of the menu. If you value being able to manage your music, I wouldn’t suggest this watch.
The fast settings menu, which appears when you swipe down from the top, contains a few helpful options, such as “locate my phone” and a weather forecast (the weather location can be set in the app). I found the nice torch option to be really helpful when taking the trash out at night because it makes the screen brilliant white to assist you see in the dark.
Experience with Software
User Experience
A unique operating system powers the watch. Because of how simple the UI is, I had no trouble figuring out how to utilize it. I was able to access the most of the functionality with just 2 or 3 taps using the touch screen and the one button on the right side.
To assess how you are doing in relation to your daily goals, swipe left or right from the home page to cycle through the different health and fitness panels. The main menu can be accessed by swiping up, while the fast settings menu can be accessed by sliding down.
Other than opening the main menu and selecting the messages symbol, there is no easy method to see your notifications. This is a unique smartwatch layout that makes it challenging to access such a crucial feature. Moreover, only the main menu provides access to the music player.
Observe Face
The watch may be customized with more than 100 different watch faces that can be downloaded via the app. After the first download, you may rapidly switch between the several faces on the watch.
You must select a watch face that already includes the widgets you want because it is not possible to alter the widgets on the screen. The default watch face is my favorite since it displays the time and your daily exercise objectives plainly.
Buttons
The watch has a single button that can be long-pressed to go back to the home screen or serves as a back button.
Like with several smartwatches, there is no scrolling bezel or crown dial on this watch. The single button appears reasonable because the user interface isn’t very difficult to browse.
Notifications
The notification mirroring was quite inadequate, in my opinion. Despite the smartphone app’s notifications being enabled and the necessary permissions being granted. I still only get alerts from a small number of apps.
The alerts are similarly hard to access; to view a feed, choose messages from the main menu. Once you’ve done that, there is no interactivity and it just shows the three most recent alerts, and even then, it only shows a fraction of the notice.
The Popglory P22 is not a smart choice if you want to read texts or check emails on your wrist.
The watch will notify you when you have a phone call and tell you who it is, but you cannot answer it because it has no speaker or microphone. You can refuse them, but in order to accept them you will need to pull out your phone.
Tracking Your Fitness & Health
Health Monitoring
This smartwatch’s ability to measure your daily fitness objectives, such as steps taken, distance traveled, and calories burnt, is one of its key advantages. You may swipe left or right to cycle among them on some watch faces that feature widgets to display them.
There is a setting for moving reminders, however you cannot alter the time period of inactivity that starts the reminder or the timetable. Not like the majority of other smartwatches, there are no drink reminders.
The watch also monitors your sleep, calculating a total score for you and dividing it into light and deep sleep. But, it does provide you with a sleep score based on the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Score, which considers time asleep, frequency of awakenings, and depth of sleep. You cannot observe your sleep cycles like with more expensive smartwatches.
Fitness Monitoring
The watch can monitor 7 distinct sports, including walking, running, cycling, skipping, badminton, basketball, and football, in addition to tracking your progress toward daily fitness objectives.
You may track each activity and see the time, calories expended, and distance covered for each. That was really frustrating since I frequently want to use my wristwatch to change tunes while cycling or jogging, but this was not feasible. The drawback to this function is that you cannot use the watch for anything else at the same time.
Mobile application
The watch may be connected to the iPhone and Android versions of the HeroBandIII software. I found the settings to be simple to use, however the way the fitness tracking data is presented is confusing given how basic the data is.
A battery’s life
Despite just having a modest 180mAh battery, the energy life of a basic smartwatch is really outstanding. The battery indicator is still showing roughly 75% battery after a week of use, thus I anticipate it to live much longer than the 10 days Popglory claims.
This is a common occurrence; others have also requested up to three weeks on a single charge.
Verdict
So, how does the Popglory rate? If you want a straightforward wristwatch that indicates the time, is pleasant to wear, and monitors your progress toward regular exercise objectives. The battery life, which hardly altered throughout my week of testing, really impressed me.
Beyond these fundamental capabilities, even a fitness tracker would have, it falls short. The music player is hidden in the menu and only gives the most basic options, the notification mirroring is extremely bad and frequently misses important alerts, and the sports tracking function is nothing to write home about because it lacks GPS.
I suggest you look at something like the Ticwatch E2, which isn’t all that much more expensive, to get the most out of a wristwatch. It integrates with a variety of different services, like Google Fit, and includes GPS, the capacity to install third-party apps like Spotify, among other features.
