Nothing under its CMF by Nothing brand launched its second smartwatch – CMF Watch Pro 2 earlier this week. The smartwatch adds several features that the first generation CMF watch lacked, while retaining the built-in microphone and speaker for voice calling capabilities, GPS support and promises up to 11 days battery life.
I have been using the latest smartwatch for a few days. Is this the best smartwatch under Rs. 5000? Let’s dive into the review to find out.
Box Contents
- CMF Watch Pro in Ash Grey colour with matching straps
- Charging cable
- Safety information and warranty information, User Guide
Design and Build
The CMF Watch Pro 2 has the circular design compared to a square design in the CMF Watch Pro. It measures 255 x 45 x 13.6mm and weighs 48.1 grams with the silicone strap for the Ash Grey and Dark Colour.
The Blue and Orange colours with a vegan leather strap is slightly thicker at 13.9mm, but it is lighter at 44.4 grams. The interchangeable bezels change the look of the watch. Coming to the strap, the bundled silicone strap in the Ash colour is flexible and is made of skin-friendly material, and the quality of the strap is good.
The vegan leather Orange and Blue straps look nice, but it is not flexible, and it was not comfortable for me when using it during workouts and runs since the strap that gets wet with sweat doesn’t feel nice.
The smartwatch has IP68 water resistance. There is Accelerometer, 24h Heart Rate Monitor and SpO2 Sensor. It uses Bluetooth 5.3 to connect to Android 8.0 and above and iOS 13 and devices and above. This time, the company has also added an ambient light sensor.
There is a single functional crown on the right side with a metal finish that lets you wake up the watch, go back, open the menu, pause workouts, and you can rotate to cycle through the app menu. You can also see the speaker below it. On the other side, there is a microphone. The watch has an aluminium alloy case with a sandblasted finish that looks and feels premium.
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 CMF Watch Pro 2 has a 1.32-inch (466 x 466 Pixels) 352 PPI AMOLED touch screen. The screen is smaller than the Watch Pro, but it is sharper. You can set it to turn on when you lift your hand, and the screen turns off in a few seconds to save power. You can also use always on display options, and there are 8 always-on options, but this will drain the battery.
Outdoor visibility is good since it has 620 nits brightness. You can adjust the brightness with the quick settings toggle by swiping from the top or from Settings→Display & Brightness. You can adjust it from level 1 till 5, and increase the screen time out till 20 seconds, and there is also auto brightness adjustment since it has an ambient light sensor. I felt the brightness to be less for indoors in low light when auto brightness adjustment is set, but this works well for bright outdoors. So, for indoors, you can set it to level 2 is good.
When you swipe from the top, you can see quick settings. This has DND mode, Power saver, raise to wake toggle, Brightness adjustment, Flashlight and settings. Overall, the Watch Pro has a brilliant screen for the price.
Pressing the function button, shows exercise, Exercise records, heart rate, blood oxygen, active score, activity, sleep, stress, cycles, world clock, reminder, phone call, music, camera remote, weather, breathing, voice assistant, stopwatch, timer, alarm, calculator, calendar, flashlight, find my phone and settings. You can use the crown to cycle through the settings, and scroll through the menu easily.
There is a new Gesture control feature. You can answer calls, skip songs, and check weather with gestures, but the company says that this will drain the battery.
Just swipe right from the main watch face to access four customisable widget screens. You can mix and match these features from the app. Swiping from the bottom on the home screen shows an easy notification shade. You can read them, dismiss, and send a quick reply.
Bluetooth Calling
The watch has a built-in calling feature, since it has a microphone and a speaker. It shows call log, and there is even a dial pad, in addition to contacts option which you can add from the app. You can manage up to 30 contacts on your watch, so you can manage calls directly from your wrist.
Calling experience is good indoors, and the microphone is able to pick up the voice well. It uses AI call noise cancellation, according to the company. For calls outdoors, it cuts down most background noise, especially in noisy traffic, which was already good in the first generation Watch Pro. The speaker output is loud enough for indoors, but not the best outdoors, if you are in a noisy environment.
Software
The CMF Watch Pro 2 uses CMF Watch app on Android and iPhone. It shows all the important details on the health tab. In the health tab in the home screen, it shows steps, minutes, calories, distance, and also has tabs for exercise, stress, Blood oxygen, heart rate, sleep, and there is cycles, activity score and training load tabs which were not there in the first CMF Watch. There is also an exercise tab to launch workouts from the app itself, and the device tab shows the battery life, watch faces and more.
The dial gallery shows different types of watch faces, and the company says that there are 100 watch faces. There are a lot of watch faces to choose from, and they are unique that goes in with Nothing’s design language, and you can further customize some of the watch faces with different colours and changing the functions.
You can add up to 30 contacts to the watch for quick dial, and there is also a search option to add the contacts.
You can also manage sports list, toggle 24 x 7 heart rate or blood oxygen monitoring and enable auto stress monitoring. Furthermore, you can enable notifications for any app and for incoming call. There are also options for standup reminder, water reminder, alarm, DND option, editing quick reply, DND, work out detection toggle and lots more.
Fitness tracking
The CMF Watch Pro 2 has 120 sports modes with auto-recognition of 5 sports. There are warm-up exercises such as stretches which are new.
These sports modes include Outdoor run, Indoor run, Outdoor walk, Indoor walk, Outdoor cycle, Indoor cycle, Hiking, Soccer, Basketball, Mountain hike, Yoga, Boxing, Cross-trainer, Free Training, Strength training, Skiing, Dynamic cycle, Cross-country running, Snowboarding, Cross-country skiing, Rower, Stair stepper, Treadmill, HIIT, Fitness exercises, Pilates, CrossFit, Functional training, Physical training, Taekwondo, Karate, Fencing, Core training, Kendo, Horizontal bar, Parallel bar, Belly dance, Jazz dance, Latin dance, Ballet, Street dance, Other dance, Roller skating,
Martial arts, Tai chi, Hula hooping, Disc sports, Darts, Archery, Horse riding, Kiteflying, Swing, Stairs, Fishing, Badminton, Table tennis, Tennis, Billiards, Bowling, Volleyball, Shuttlecock, Handball, Baseball,
Softball, Cricket, Rugby, Hockey, Squash, Dodgeball, Sailing, Surfing,
Jet skiing, Skating, Ice Hockey, Curling, Skateboarding, Rock climbing, Cooldown, Cross training, Australian football, Hunting, Golf, Fitness gaming, Aerobic exercises, Rolling, Pickleball, Flexibility exercises, Hand cycling, Mind & Body, Wrestling, Gymnastics, Track & Field, Snow sports, Lacrosse, Sit-ups, Push-ups, Battle rope, Smith machine, Pull-ups, Zumba, Plank, Kabaddi, Shot, Javelin, Long jump, High jump, Trampoline, Dumbbell, Karting, Kickboxing, Beach football, Beach volleyball, Gateball, Sepak takraw, Luge, Parachuting, Racing, Parkour, Jump rope, and Tae Bo.
For outdoor activities, you get all the details such as exercise duration (hours, minutes, seconds), calories, real-time heart rate, pace, steps, distance, exercise performance, recovery time, active score and training load.
It has built-in GPS support, so you need not carry the phone with you for outdoor activities. Since it uses 5 GNSS Systems such as GPS/GLONASS/Galileo/QZSS/Beidou, the lock is quick, and it did not get cut off during my run. You can press the side button to pause a workout in the middle.
Compared to tracking apps like Strava running on mobile, or other GPS watches like Amazfit BIP 5 that also has GPS, it is almost accurate in GPS tracking. CMF has finally added option Google Health, and Strava, and for iPhone syncs to Apple Health.
The new active score feature quantifies your physical activity based on heart rate data from the previous 7 days. This metric helps you track your
daily activity, according to the company. This is something like PAI score in Amazfit watches. Hope we can expect tracking features like tracking friends’ scores in the future.
Sleep Tracking
Sleep tracking shows core sleep, deep sleep, awake time, as well as REM sleep. Tracking is good without any issues compare to the BIP 5 smartwatch that I was wearing in other hand. CMF said that it has improved its Smart Sleep Technology. The watch can now record daytime naps and sleep stages.
Heart rate, SpO2 and stress 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. It also shows stress data, but you need to enable this manually. You also need to enable 24 x 7 SpO2 monitor from the settings, however this drains the battery quickly.
Battery life
The smartatch has a 305 mAh battery, smaller than the 340mAh battery in the older model. Since this has a smaller screen, this should be fine. The company promises up to 11 days of battery life with typical use, and up to 9 days with heavy use. During my use, I charged the watch first the first time today after 8 days of heavy use, with 24h heart rate and SpO2 tracking, GPS use of about 4 and half hours and about 4 calls over Bluetooth during my use.
The company promises 25 hours under continuous GPS use on a single charge, and up to 17.5 hours of continuous Bluetooth calls on a single charge. Battery life is less compared to the CMF Watch Pro, but it is still good.
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 close to 2 hours to charge the watch fully from 0%. Charging time doesn’t matter since it lasts for over a week.
Conclusion
The CMF Watch Pro 2 is a good upgrade to the first smartwatch in terms of design with the addition of interchangeable bezels, and adding the missing features such as Strava and Google Fit sync, improved sleep tracking, and fine tuning voice calling capabilities. The watch face designs could be have been better, and the watch still doesn’t have an option to share workout data as an image. The watch costs Rs. 500 more compared to the CMF Watch Pro since it starts at Rs. 4999.
Pricing and availability
The CMF Watch Pro 2 is priced at Rs. 4,999 for the silicone strap model and the vegan leather strap model costs Rs. 5,499. It will be available from Flipkart, and through retail partners starting from July 12th at 12 noon. The Bezel + Strap Set costs Rs. 749.
Consumers purchasing the CMF Phone 1 on Flipkart.com can avail of a Rs. 1,000 discount on the CMF Watch Pro 2.
Pros
- 1.32″ AMOLED display is crisp
- Attractive design with easy to switch bezels, Solid build quality
- GPS support for accurate outdoor activity tracking with Strava and Google Fit sync
- Bluetooth calling is good
- Long battery life
Cons
- Auto brightness adjustment is not perfect
- No option to share workout data as an image