Realme Watch S Pro Review: Realme finally got it right
Realme entered the fitness wearables segment in India with the launch of the Realme Band earlier this year in March. Although the fitness band wasn’t as well-received as Realme may have expected, the company pushed forth and launched a second fitness wearable, the Realme Watch, in May. The Realme Watch did bring some significant improvements over the Realme Band, we didn’t find it to be as polished of a product as some of its competitors. So when we first got word that Realme was gearing up to launch two premium smartwatches in India, we kept our expectations grounded. After having used the Realme Watch S Pro for a little over a week, I can safely say that Realme has learned from its mistakes and has finally created a product that can hold its own against competitors from Xiaomi and Amazfit.
Realme Watch S Pro: Specifications
| Specification | Realme Watch S Pro |
|---|---|
| Dimensions & Weight |
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| Materials |
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| Strap |
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| Display |
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| Compatibility |
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| Sensors |
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| Connectivity |
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| NFC payments | No |
| Battery | 420mAh, proprietary charging dock |
| IP rating | 5ATM water resistance, IP68 |
| Colors | Black |
Note: The Realme Watch S Pro was loaned to us by Realme India for the purpose of this review. The review was written after a week of use. Realme did not have any input regarding the content of this review.
Realme Watch S Pro: Design & Display
The Realme Watch S Pro offers a premium design that’s befitting of its price tag. It has a 46mm stainless steel case with two buttons on the right edge that control all of its functions. While the case is almost as thick as that of the Mi Watch Revolve, it doesn’t have a raised lip around the display. This, coupled with the matte black finish, makes it seem like the Watch S Pro is a bit smaller than the Mi Watch Revolve and it doesn’t look as massive on my wrist. However, I would’ve still preferred a smaller 42mm or 44mm variant.
Much like the Mi Watch Revolve, the Realme Watch S Pro packs a 1.39-inch AMOLED display in the chunky 46mm case. The display is surrounded by a slim bezel within the case and a thicker bezel around it, which features dial marks that aren’t as subtle as the ones found on the Mi Watch Revolve. To prevent scuffs and scratches in everyday use, the display on the Watch S Pro is protected by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3.
The display on the Realme Watch S Pro is quite vibrant and it gets sufficiently bright for optimal visibility in direct sunlight.
The Realme Watch S Pro comes in a single black color variant with a black silicone strap. But if you’re not a fan of the muted all-black look, you will be able to purchase three other color variants — Orange, Blue, and Green — early next year. The company also plans to offer premium vegan leather straps for the watch, which will be available in four color options — Orange, Black, Blue, and Green. In case you don’t like any of the aforementioned strap options, you’d be glad to know that the Realme Watch S Pro uses standard 22mm quick-release straps. So, you’ll be able to pick any of the numerous third-party options available online based on your personal taste.
Now that we’ve talked at length about the design of the Realme Watch S Pro, let’s take a closer look at its display. The 1.39-inch touch-sensitive AMOLED panel on the watch offers a resolution of 454 x 454 pixels, a pixel density of 326ppi, a peak brightness of 450nits. As you’d expect, the display is quite vibrant and it gets sufficiently bright for optimal visibility in direct sunlight. This is something that Realme has struggled with in its previous offerings, and I’m glad to see the company taking steps in the right direction.
The Realme Watch S Pro offers 5 levels of brightness settings and an auto-brightness mode. I used the smartwatch on level 3 for the majority of my testing and I didn’t face any visibility issues. As with the Mi Watch Revolve, the Realme Watch S Pro comes with an always-on display feature, which displays the time, date, and day on the display in either a digital or an analog format. But I wouldn’t recommend using this feature if you have raise-to-wake turned on, as it takes a significant toll on the watch’s battery life.
Realme Watch S Pro: Features
As with most other smartwatches in the sub-₹15,000 price range, the Realme Watch S Pro is nothing but a fitness tracker with a large display. It offers pretty much all the fitness tracking features you’d find on the much cheaper Realme Watch, but you can expect to see better tracking capabilities because of the premium hardware.
In terms of sensors, the Realme Watch S Pro features a 6-axis accelerometer, a geomagnetic sensor, a gyroscope sensor, a PPG heart rate sensor, and a wearing monitor sensor. These sensors enable features like continuous heart rate monitoring, blood oxygen monitoring (SpO2), sleep tracking, step tracking, and 15 sports modes (including a new swimming mode). Additionally, the Watch S Pro offers notification support, a sedentary reminder, a water reminder, an alarm clock and stopwatch, music playback controls, camera shutter controls, a compass, breathing exercises, and a Find My Phone feature.
You can keep a track of all the aforementioned features on the watch and the Realme Link app. On the watch, you’ll find five widgets to the right of the home screen, including activity tracking, weather, sleep tracking, heart rate monitoring, and music playback controls.
As seen in the images, the widgets give you a quick overview of each of these features, and you can get more detailed info on the Realme Link app. The sleep monitoring widget is the only exception, as you can swipe up on it to see detailed information about last night’s sleep. Along with these widgets, the watch also shows you incoming notifications for apps that have been whitelisted in the Realme Link app. These notifications are displayed on the watch face as soon as they arrive, and you can view them later by pulling down the notification shade as you would on your Android device.
The Watch S Pro also has a quick settings menu that you can access by swiping to the right of the home screen. It includes five quick settings tiles to enable/disable the power saving mode, flashlight, DND mode, and raise-to-wake features. The fifth tile lets you quickly adjust the display brightness.
You can access the rest of the features by swiping up on the home screen and opening the app drawer. Here, you’ll find the alarm clock, settings, compass, workout modes, weather, heart rate monitoring, breathing training, stopwatch/timer, SpO2 monitoring, camera shutter controls, Find My Phone, and your workout records.
It’s worth noting that you can quickly access the workout modes by clicking the bottom button on the watch. The settings option in the app drawer includes always-on display settings, a screen off timer option, a raise-to-wake option, vibration intensity customizations, DND mode settings, and a System tab to restart, turn off, and reset the watch.
In terms of customizations, the Realme Watch S Pro comes with over 100 unique watch faces. To switch between the watch faces installed on the watch, you can tap and hold on the home screen and then swipe through all the available options.
In case you don’t like any of the pre-installed watch faces, you can open up the Realme Link app, and sync a new watch face to the watch. Additionally, the app gives you the option to use any image of your choice as a watch face. However, you can only select a digital watch face with a custom image.
Along with the watch face customization, the Realme Link app gives you access to all the fitness tracking data collected by the watch. It also features some additional settings to turn on/off the sedentary reminder, water reminder, music playback controls, and Find My Phone features, whitelist apps for the smart notifications feature, and set a step goal. Furthermore, it includes a handy user guide to help you figure out all of the watch’s features.
My experience with the Realme Watch S Pro
While the Realme Watch S Pro isn’t as feature-rich as the Mi Watch Revolve, it delivered a significantly better user experience. I faced absolutely no software issues with the smartwatch and I found its fitness tracking features to be more or less accurate. To check its accuracy, I used it alongside the Apple Watch Series 3 for a couple of days. And in almost all scenarios, the results delivered by the Watch S Pro didn’t deviate more than 5-7%.
For instance, during a 20-minute indoor walk session, the Realme Watch S Pro recorded 2191 steps, 1.70km covered, an average heart rate of 113 BPM, and 137 kcal burnt. The Apple Watch Series 3, on the other hand, recorded 2231 steps, 1.65 km covered, an average heart rate of 122 BPM, and 93 kcal burnt. As you can see, the number of calories burnt was the only metric that showed a larger deviation, but that’s quite acceptable given the significant price difference between the two smartwatches.
I wasn’t able to compare the sleep tracking performance between the two watches, as wearing both to sleep was a bit uncomfortable. But I did keep an eye on my sleep schedule over the last week, and the overall results seemed reasonably accurate. However, I did notice one inconsistency during my testing. On one particular day in the last week, I randomly woke up at around 4 AM and I couldn’t go back to sleep until 7 AM. But the watch didn’t record this instance accurately and showed that I was asleep throughout the night.
It’s worth noting that I wasn’t able to test the GPS performance of the Watch S Pro as I didn’t venture out of the house because of the current pandemic scenario. So, I can’t comment on its accuracy or its impact on battery life. My sports mode testing was also limited to indoor activities and you may get different results with outdoor activities.
My experience with the Realme Watch S Pro was completely bug-free and enjoyable. It just worked.
All of the Watch S Pro’s remaining features also worked as intended. Raise-to-wake was responsive, so I didn’t feel the need to turn on the always-on display feature, the camera shutter and music playback controls worked as you’d expect, and the SpO2 monitoring also delivered consistent results. All in all, my experience with the Realme Watch S Pro was bug-free and enjoyable.
The Realme Link app also performed quite well and, while syncing watch faces did take an awfully long amount of time, my overall experience was quite positive. The app was responsive, didn’t take too long to sync data from the watch, and displayed all the metrics in an easy to understand fashion.
Battery life & charging
Realme claims that the Watch S Pro offers 14 days of use on a single charge with continuous heart rate monitoring turned on and, in my testing, I found the claim to be more or less accurate. With a week of use, the Watch S Pro’s battery only depleted to 54% with heart rate monitoring set at 5-minute intervals, screen brightness set to level 3, always-on display turned off, no GPS use, and a daily indoor workout of 30 minutes.
This leads me to believe that the watch could easily last two weeks with a similar use case. However, if you turn on the always-on display feature and make frequent use of the watch’s GPS functionality, the battery won’t last the rated 14 days. The charging performance of the included proprietary charging cradle was satisfactory, and it managed to get the 420mAh battery from 50%-100% in about an hour.
Should you buy the Realme Watch S Pro?
If you’re in the market for a premium fitness tracker in the sub-₹10,000 price range, the Realme Watch S Pro is, in my opinion, a good buy. Although it doesn’t offer as many fitness tracking features as the similarly priced Mi Watch Revolve (review), all the features that it does offer work as intended without any unwanted bugs. On top of that, it offers IP68 dust and water-resistance rating and a better six-axis accelerometer, that you don’t get with Xiaomi’s offering.
In case you’re open to slightly older hardware, I would still recommend getting the Amazfit GTS (review) and Amazfit GTR (review) over the Realme Watch S Pro, as they offer almost as many features and you can get them for as low as ₹7,999 during sales. And if you’re willing to spend a couple of thousand bucks extra, the new Amazfit GTS 2 and Amazfit GTR 2 are significantly better options, as they offer a bunch of additional features like Amazon Alexa support, onboard music storage and playback, and more.
- The Realme Watch S Pro is a premium fitness tracker that offers a bright and vibrant display, a good selection of features, and great battery life.
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