realme under its TechLife brand launched the Watch S100, a budget smartwatch, in India earlier this month. It has a large 1.69-inch color LCD full-touch display, comes with body temperature monitoring, and promises up to 12 days of battery life. I have been using the latest smartwatch from realme for a couple of weeks now, and here is the review.
Box Contents
- realme TechLife Watch S100 in Black colour
- Magnetic charging cable
- User manual
Design and Build
The Watch S100 has a square design that seen in most smartwatches. It measures 251×35.8×11.6mm and weighs 34 grams with the strap. The smartwatch has IP68 water resistance. There is Accelerometer, 24h Heart Rate Monitor, SpO2 Sensor and Skin Temperature monitoring. It uses Bluetooth 5.1 to connect to Android and iOS devices.
Coming to the strap, it has a lightweight 20mm interchangeable strap that is made of skin-friendly material, but the quality could have been better. There is a single function button on the right side that lets you wake up the watch and also go back, but it doesn’t open any function.
On the back, you can see the heart rate and SpO2 sensors that have glowing green and Red LED lights when you are using it to measure heart rate and blood oxygen.
Display and features
Coming to the display, the realme TechLife Watch S100 has a large 1.69-inch (240×280 pixels) 218 PPI LCD glass colour touch screen with 2.5D scratch resistant glass. You can set it to turn on when you lift your hand, and the screen turns off in a few seconds to save power. Touch screen is smooth to use. Outdoor visibility is good since it has up to 530 nits brightness. You can adjust the brightness by swiping to the left or from Settings→Adjust Brightness. You can adjust it from level 20% till 100%, and increase the screen time out till 15 seconds, but there is no auto brightness adjustment since it lacks an ambient light sensor. For indoors, level 2 is good, and level 4 or 5 is need for bright outdoors.
There is also an easy notification shade option when you swipe from the left. This has DND, Brightness adjustment, raise to wake, flashlight option that brightens up the screen and settings. The raise to wake feature is so sensitive, so it might wake even when you are working or riding a vehicle.
Swiping from the bottom shows body temperature measurement, workouts, activity records, heart rate monitoring, SpO2 monitoring, Sleep details, sports mode, activity, sleep, notifications and weather.
The next page has breath, music control that lets you play, pause, skip tracks and also adjust volume when you play any music or any kind of content like videos or music when the watch is connected to the phone. There is also alarm, stopwatch, timer and camera control option, but you need to enable it first from the app. You can also see the flagship and find my phone options.
When you swipe from the top, you can read or clear the notification you receive from the smartphone, but you can’t reply to them. Swiping to the left shows activity data, body temperature measurement, sleep, heart rate, weather and music controls.
Software
The watch uses the new realme Fit companion app on Android and iPhone instead of the usual realme Link app for other realme Watch models. It shows activity details in the home screen along with heart rate data, sleep data, blood oxygen record, body temperature record. The sports tab shows workout details, and the device tab shows the battery status and lets you customize the watch.
There are a lot of watch faces to choose from, but only a few options show a lot of data such as steps, heart rate, calories burnt, weather and other details. There is a custom dial option that lets you add a custom image and choose a font color.
In the settings you can select call reminders, notifications from the preferred apps, health reminders such as 24-hour HR monitoring, SpO2 monitoring stand up reminders, Water reminder, sedentary reminder and more. However, there is no option to sync your data to realme servers so that you can’t get back the data if you switch to a new phone. It also lacks Google fit or Strava sync for workouts.
Fitness and sleep tracking
The realme TechLife Watch S100 has 24 Sports modes including Outdoor Running, Walking, Outdoor Riding, Football, Mountaineering, Dancing, Yoga and Basketball.
For outdoor activities, you get all the details such as distance, calories burnt, average heart rate and more. Since the watch doesn’t have GPS, you can use the phone’s GPS, but doesn’t lock properly, and when you start your run directly from the watch, it doesn’t track routs and takes data only based on steps, so there is about 100m difference when compared to GPS watches. This is common in budget watches.
Sleep tracking shows light and deep sleep as well as awake time, but it doesn’t show REM sleep. Tracking is decent, but not the best. Even after you are awake in your bed, it records as sleeping.
Heart rate, SpO2 and body temperature monitoring
The smartwatch uses LED lights and photo-diodes to illuminate the blood vessel for a while and monitors the heart rate via the change of green light absorbed, and it uses red light for SpO2 or blood oxygen monitoring. You can’t say this is 100% accurate. Heart rate recordings — both resting and active, and SpO2 readings are decent compared to oximeter.
The smartwatch also has body and skin temperature monitoring, which is a unique feature that is rarely present in smartwatches. It takes a few seconds to show the data, which is decent, but not accurate compared to a thermometer. The company says the data is only for reference and is not for medical use. On the watch, it shows both skin and body temperature, and the app shows minimum and maximum body temperature.
Battery life
The Watch has a 260mAh battery, and the company promises up to 13 days of battery life. During my use of a couple of weeks, I charged it only once a couple of days back. I used it for daily run tracking for about 40 minutes, set brightness to 3 both indoor and outdoor and have minimal notifications enabled. Battery life might vary depending on frequent use of the display with increased brightness, use of heart rate monitor during workouts and all the notifications turned on.
It has a magnetic charging dock that you can even plug it in a USB port of a PC or a laptop or use power bank in low-power mode. It takes about 2 hours to charge the watch fully from 0%. Since the battery lasts for close to two weeks, long charging time doesn’t matter.
Conclusion
The realme TechLife Watch S100 is a decent smartwatch for a casual use under Rs. 2500. It has a large colour touch screen with a lot of watch faces, comes with body temperature monitoring as well as heart rate and SpO2 monitoring and offers a good battery life. The realme Fit app needs work, most importantly, a cloud sync feature to store your data when you switch devices.
The realme TechLife Watch S100 is priced at Rs. 2499, but it is available from realme.com, Flipkart and offline stores at an offer price of Rs. 2,299 for a limited period.
Pros
- Large 1.69-inch touch display
- Good design, light-weight body
- Body temperature monitoring
- Good battery life
Cons
- No cloud sync for realme Fit app
- Activity and sleep tracking are not accurate