Personal accessories company Noise has launched the Noise Colorfit Nav smartwatch in India as its latest budget wearable. This smartwatch offers built-in GPS, an optical heart rate sensor, a colour touchscreen, and a few workout modes for keeping track of fitness. The new Colorfit Nav promises up to four days of battery life and is also IP68 certified for water and dust resistance, and is priced at a competitive price point of Rs. 4,499 in India. We have comprehensively tested the device for more than a week to see if it fulfils all of its promises. Here’s our detailed review.
Noise Colorfit Nav design
The Noise Colorfit Nav has a square-shaped dial and is only available in one size. There are two physical buttons on the right for UI navigation; one for going back in the smartwatch interface, and the other for turning the display on or off. Both offer good tactile feedback. The watch case is made from polycarbonate and feels quite sturdy. This wearable has been launched in two colour options – Camo Green and Stealth Black. It has smooth edges and weighs only 40g, making it comfortable to wear on the wrist. The silicone straps are detachable, and we wish there were colour options.
The removable straps use a click-on mechanism that allows them to stay in place, the strap didn’t feel as though it was becoming loose at any time during the review. Noise uses a proprietary magnetic charger for the Colorfit Nav, and the pins for this are on at the back of the watch casing, right below the optical heart rate sensor. Overall, the build quality is quite satisfactory for the price point that this wearable comes in at, and the design is minimalistic yet striking.
The Noise Colorfit Nav weighs only 40g
Noise Colorfit Nav specifications and features
The Noise Colorfit Nav has a 1.4-inch (320×320-pixel) TFT LCD colour touch display, and offers multiple watch faces. The device has built-in GPS and supports Bluetooth 4.2. It is compatible with smartphones running Android 5 and above and iPhones running iOS 9 and above. The wearable has an accelerometer, gyroscope, and optical heart rate sensor. It is IP68 water and dust resistant, which means it can survive exposure to water at a maximum depth of 1.5m for up to 30 minutes. We wore it in the shower and while washing utensils, and it managed to survive both these situations. Noise does warn buyers not to wear this device in a sauna, during a hot water bath, and in ocean water, as humidity and salt can damage the band.
The Noise Colorfit Nav is able to count steps, calories, distance travelled, and hours slept. The device comes with a “Breathe Mode” to prompt users to take some time off and focus on being calm. It offers continuous heart rate monitoring at intervals ranging from five to 60 minutes. You can also preset your intended sleep time, and get inactivity alerts to motivate you to move around. There’s also the addition of hand washing reminder which could be particularly useful at this time.
The device lets you see caller name information and reject incoming calls. It also supports the useful Find My Phone feature. You can check weather forecast information, control music playback and the camera shutter on your phone, and set timers and alarms. There’s a wake gesture, vibration alerts, DND mode, and more. The Settings section on the watch allow users to adjust brightness and vibration intensity.
Noise Colorfit Nav interface and software
The Noise Colorfit Nav is very easy to navigate through. Swiping down opens the notification panel for all app alerts, and swiping up opens the Control Center where you’ll find useful information and settings such as the battery percentage, brightness, airplane mode, Find My Phone, and DND mode. Airplane Mode completely shuts down the connection with your paired phone. The DND mode blocks all notification alerts, and the Find My Phone feature makes your smartphone beep to help you find it if you’ve misplaced it.
The Noise Colorfit Nav has several options in its Settings menu
The Settings option in the Control Center opens up a host of other controls such as Accessibility, which lets you reduce the font size and enable or disable GPS while working out. There is a ‘Wrist Orientation’ option which lets you flip the display orientation based on whether you wear the watch on your left or right hand. You will also find a ‘Wake Settings’ option that lets you enable/disable the lift to wake’ gesture, adjust the screen timeout delay, and enable/ disable Night Mode. Settings is also where you’ll be able to switch watch faces on your Noise Colorfit Nav, and there are twelve different designs to choose from.
Swiping left and right on the watch face takes you to the Alarms, Breathe Mode, Reminder, and Heart Rate pages. You can check your heart rate manually as well as at preset intervals, and this section also shows the last heart rate recorded and how long ago that was.
There is a dedicated Music section as well, which lets you control the music playing on your phone as well as volume through the watch. This is very handy while working out. The Sleep section shows you sleep data for the past five days, broken down into the number of hours slept, the percentage of your sleep goal you’ve achieved, and the proportions of light and deep sleep through each night.
The Workout section has eight options to choose from: walking, running, outdoor cycling, indoor cycling, indoor walking, indoor running, yoga, and strength training. While these may be enough for some, they could prove to be insufficient for athletes who look for a more diverse selection of sports and activities.
Colorfit Nav users will have to download the Noise Fit X app. There’s a simple registration process that asks for your gender, date of birth, weight, and height. It then generates goals for you, and these can be customised to suit your preferences at any time. The app interface is fairly simple and intuitive. It is easy to navigate through, and data is presented in simple graphs. The main Activity board shows the step count, active time, distance covered, calories burnt, hours slept, heart rate, and run time. Tapping on each activity opens up more detailed monthly and weekly data logs.
The Noise Fit X app offers deep customisations
The Settings section inside the Noise Fit X app offers deep customisations including optional Google Fit sync. For instance, it lets you manually enter low and high heart rate thresholds depending on your condition, and lets you preset your ideal sleep and wake times for appropriate alerts. You can also the frequency and duration for hand wash and inactivity alerts.
Noise Colorfit Nav performance and battery life
We tested the Noise Colorfit Nav for over two weeks, and had a fairly satisfactory experience overall. The screen is bright enough outdoors and indoors. It seems to have an oleophobic coating to reduce fingerprint smudges. The font is very easy to read, even on a screen this small. The deep customisations offered by Noise for several functions – brightness, vibration, heart rate monitoring, sleep alerts, lift to wake, and even hand wash reminders – were useful. This smartwatch does not have an always-on display, and it lets you delay standby for only up to 15 seconds. This is likely done to manage battery life. We found no real problems with the heart rate monitoring data, and our sleep logs seemed to reflect our own experience of sleep through the nights. During workouts, the watch automatically tracks heart rate and logs the data.
The Noise Colorfit Nav allows for continuous heart rate monitoring
Given the price point, there aren’t any fancy features like gesture recognition, but touch input worked well and was problem-free throughout our time with the device. We took four 1km walks in different areas – twice with the GPS on and twice with the GPS off. We found that when walking with GPS on, it measured 1.1km once and 1.12km the other time. When the GPS was turned off, the distance covered was measured at 1.25km and 1.3km. All of these measurements aren’t too off the mark. Step counting was also fairly accurate, with 990 steps recorded on average against 1,000 manually counted steps.
During our review, we found that the battery would last for a little over four days when the GPS was kept off throughout, no major activity was conducted, no workout mode was used, and heart rate sensor was set to measure once every hour. When we ramped up the strain with GPS on, one workout per day for about half an hour, and heart rate monitoring set to once every five minutes, the Noise Colorfit Nav’s battery lasted for just about two and half days. The brightness was kept at mid-level in the first round of testing, and cranked up to the maximum level for the second round. Battery life could reduce further with even more intense use. The Noise Colorfit Nav took about two hours to charge fully.
Verdict
The Noise Colorfit Nav offers a lot at a competitive price point. There’s continuous heart rate monitoring, built-in GPS, IP68 certification, a colour touchscreen, and good build quality. It has a simple interface and the font is easy to read. The app pairing and registration process was fluid, and plenty of customisation options are offered. Currently, the Noise Colorfit Nav is available on Amazon India at a competitive price of Rs. 4,499.
There were some disappointments though. Battery life isn’t that great. Heavy users may find themselves needing to charge the wearable every two days. The Noise Colorfit Nav lacks a diverse set of workout modes compared to the other watches at the same price. For instance, the Realme Watch offers 14 workout modes that include table tennis, basketball, football, elliptical, and even cricket.
If longer battery life is what you’re looking for, then we could point you towards the Amazfit Bip Lite, which claims to offer 45 days of runtime per charge, though in our review, we found that it lasted 13 days with most of its features enabled. This model doesn’t have built-in GPS though, and doesn’t offer as many customisation options. The Realme Watch is another option that promises 7 to 9 days of battery life, although we haven’t reviewed it yet.