It’s been about two days since my Watch Pro was delivered, and in that time I have gotten a chance to thoroughly use it and all of it’s various functions. My experience with it has been a mixed bag of great hardware and bug-ridden nearly alpha stage software. I write this in hope that someone at CMF or Nothing will read it and fix some of the things stated here.
The hardware of the watch is something I can’t complain about at all. I ordered the “Metallic Gray” variant, and the fit and finish of the device is top notch. It feels premium without being too heavy and I’ve gotten many questions about what I have on my wrist in these past two days. Congratulations on the design of this, it truly is a stunning piece of budget tech.
The battery is also everything I was promised. As a longtime Amazfit user, this is on point with what I would expect and I’m glad to see nearly multi-week battery life.
But as nice as the hardware is, the software is where it falls apart. From features every smartwatch should have simply being non-exist to just broken functionality, things take a rather sharp turn when you look under the hood.
My biggest gripe on the watch is notifications. When I say notifications, I mean pretty much every single thing about the way the watch handles notifications.
• So let’s say you get a notification. On almost every other smartwatch ever the screen will light up, allowing you to quickly read what was sent so you can get on your way. The Watch Pro doesn’t do this. It vibrates and that’s it, requiring you to either raise your wrist or click the button to view the notification. I don’t like raise to wake as the sensor in this particular device seems quite sensitive so I have to click the button each and every time my watch manages to actually get a notification, which is quite rare. Please, at least introduce this as an optional feature.
• Most smartwatches give you a list of almost every app installed on your phone, allowing you to choose which apps you would like to get notifications from. Not this watch, it seems to cherry pick which apps you can and can’t get notifications for. Gmail is a very surprising omission from the apps list, meaning I can’t get notifications when I get emails which is definitely unfortunate.
• Not being able to read the entirety of a notification is also quite a bummer. The watch gives you a few lines and then just cuts the rest of it off even if you tap into a notification to try to read the whole thing. The ability to read the entirety of what was sent would be incredible, and I’m surprised it isn’t here.
• Notifications just don’t really work in the first place. Like at all. Sometimes I’ll receive them, and sometimes I just won’t. The app has to be active and opened at all time for you to get anything, and this might just be my phone…but more often than not the app will just be closed, making the watch a rather pretty yet pointless device for me aside from viewing the time.
I also encountered an issue where the watch just stopped updating. No notifications, weather seemed to just updating with no explanation, and even though I turned the Bluetooth off on my phone the watch still showed itself as being connected. It was like it had just given up at a specific time and stopped communicating with the phone. I had to reboot both the watch and the phone to fix this.
As buggy as the watch itself is, the smartphone app is almost worse. There seriously isn’t even a way to check how many steps you took yesterday at least to my knowledge. At midnight they simply disappear. How am I supposed to track fitness without being able to actually track things?
At this point, the Watch Pro seems like a serious case of form over function. I fail to see the point of having a beautiful device with a great screen and awesome battery life if it can’t even properly do the things it is supposed to do. Notifications are a trainwreck, the watch and app are as bug ridden as an ant farm, and even the fitness aspects seem either wildly inaccurate or just plain busted.
CMF, you have great hardware on your hands…just please take the time to fix the various issues that this product has. I love it even with how broken it is and will still be wearing it every day, but I definitely won’t be purchasing a version two if these issues aren’t ironed out.
But above all else. Fix notifications. I’m begging you.
