Realme Watch S Pro is one of the most recent additions to Realme’s wearables portfolio in India. This new model is Realme’s first smartwatch with built-in GPS. The Realme Watch S Pro has many highlights – over 100 watch faces to choose from, 15 sports modes, continuous heart rate monitoring, and reminders for drinking water and getting up from your seat. At a price of Rs. 9,999, is the Realme Watch S Pro really a worthy buy over the Realme Watch S, which is priced much lower at Rs. 4,999? I’ve been using the Realme Watch S Pro for over two weeks now, and here’s my detailed review.
Realme Watch S Pro design
The Realme Watch S Pro looks good on the wrist. Its design is evocative of a traditional watch, and the large 46mm dial offers enough real estate for navigation and reading notifications. I had my reservations about it being too chunky for my thin wrist, but I grew to like how the watch looked on my hand with each passing day. The dial is about 1.39 inches in diameter with a 454×454-pixel resolution, and the maximum brightness is 450 nits. The screen is pretty impressive, and there’s also an ambient light sensor for automatic brightness adjustment.
The Realme Watch S Pro dial measures 1.39 inches in diameter and has a 454×454-pixel resolution
You get a replaceable silicone strap with a classic buckle to hold it together on the wrist. In my time with the Realme Watch S Pro, I didn’t experience any durability issues, and the watch looked and felt premium.
Realme Watch S Pro interface
The minimalist interface allows for easy navigation. The Realme Watch S Pro has two buttons on the right that also aid in cruising through the interface. Swiping left brings up widgets that show you your step count, calories burnt, the weather, music controls, sleep data, and heart rate. The sleep data widget offers further information about sleep quality if you scroll down. Swiping right from the watch face opens a quick access menu that lets you tweak brightness, activate the power saving and do not disturb modes, and even toggle the lift-to-wake gesture. There’s also a flashlight feature, which I found myself using quite often, and is a welcome addition on a smartwatch. To have lift-to-wake as a quick access option is also useful as I prefer to disable it every night.
Long-pressing the watch faces shows a small number of watch face options. Watch faces are not customisable, but one option is to use your favourite photo as a background. If you want more options, there are more than 100 watch faces that can be selected using the Realme Link app. These cater to different personalities, and the company says it will add more in the future with software updates.
Swiping right on the Realme Watch S Pro from the watch face opens a quick access menu
The Realme Watch S Pro has a built-in compass – the first watch from the company to have this feature. In the Settings menu, you can find an Always On Display toggle, and this can be customised with your choice of dial (analog or digital), and the duration for which it should remain visible. Realme warns that keeping this feature turned on will reduce battery life by about 84 percent. You can also customise the vibration intensity of notifications and decide how long the screen should stay on before going to standby. There is a breathing guide that Realme says can help calm your nerves, and the smartwatch also offers alarm, stopwatch, and timer functionalities. There’s also a remote camera shutter feature for so you can use your paired phone’s camera from a distance.
The workout modes offer detailed data. There are 15 of them on the Realme Watch S Pro including outdoor running, indoor running, outdoor walking, indoor walking, outdoor cycling, spinning, hiking, swimming, basketball, yoga, rowing, elliptical training, cricket, strength training, and free workout. The swimming mode offers SWOLF (stroke count) data, average stroke frequency, and average pace in addition to distance, laps, and time. However, there is no way to control music while in workout mode. This forced me to reach out for my smartphone multiple times, which I wish I hadn’t had to do.
Swiping down opens the notifications shade on the Realme Watch S Pro, and the font size makes it easy to read them. There is no way to reply to messages though. You can only mute or reject calls; you cannot answer them as there is no microphone or speaker on this smartwatch.
Realme Watch S Pro companion app
Users need to download the Realme Link app from Google Play or the Apple App Store to pair the Realme Watch S Pro with their phone. Pairing the Realme Link app with my Samsung Galaxy Note 20 was a breeze. The app offers detailed workout, heart rate, and blood oxygen level data. Head to Settings > Watch Face > Gallery Face to choose the photos you want to use as your watch face background. There is also notification customisation to allow you to manually choose which apps you want to receive alerts from. I would suggest that you choose only a few to avoid clutter. You can set and customise reminders to get up from your chair and even drink water.
Users need to download the Realme Link app to pair the Realme Watch S Pro with their phone
You can choose to disable heart rate monitoring, or let the watch automatically log your heart rate every 5, 10, 20, or 30 minutes. Alerts if your heart rate is too high or low can also be toggled from the Realme Link app.
Realme Watch S Pro performance
Heart rate monitoring data was up to the mark, and the Realme Watch S Pro didn’t offer any unlikely results. Sleep data was also in keeping with the quality of sleep I experienced each night. While I didn’t find anything major to complain about with SpO2 monitoring, it is best to not rely on this data alone if you’re managing any health condition. Being water resistant up to 5ATM, I also took it for a swim, and it survived that easily.
I manually counted 1,000 steps as I walked to ascertain the accuracy of tracking on the Realme Watch S Pro. It calculated 985 steps the first time and 993 steps on my second walk. This isn’t the most accurate result I’ve seen from a wearable, but isn’t very far off either. There are many other much less expensive options, such as the Mi Band 5, that have produced better results.
I measured a 1km distance using an odometer and then walked that same distance while wearing the Realme Watch S Pro to ascertain its tracking capabilities. It managed to calculate 980m, which is also a passable number. There’s one other thing that needs to be mentioned, pertaining to the built-in GPS functionality on the watch. Whenever you begin tracking any outdoor sport or activity, the watch tries to lock on to a GPS signal, and this takes awfully long. On some occasions, I had to just give up without the GPS ever connecting, and start my workout. It could just be possible that the place where I was working out had poor GPS connectivity, but this was a consistent issue on my Realme Watch S Pro unit.
The Realme Watch S Pro takes slightly over two hours to charge completely
Coming to battery life, the Realme Watch S Pro lasted about nine days when I kept the ‘Always On Display’ active from 11am to 7pm and worked out for half an hour every day. Notifications were enabled as well, and the brightness was set to ‘Auto’. This smartwatch should last for many more days if you don’t use the ‘Always On Display’. The Realme Watch S Pro comes with a magnetic dock for charging, and it took slightly over two hours to charge completely.
Verdict
The Realme Watch S Pro, at its price of Rs. 9,999, competes with the Mi Watch Revolve and the new Amazfit GTR 2. These three watches offer similar features, with built-in GPS, lots of sports modes, and 5ATM water resistance. The biggest differentiator is that the Amazfit GTR 2 has a speaker and microphone, so you can answer calls on it and use voice commands. If this is something you find appealing, you will have to shell out a little more, as the Amazfit model retails starting at Rs. 12,999.
The Realme Watch S Pro has magnetic charging pins at the back
I personally like the design and build quality of the Realme Watch S Pro. The display is great, and text is easily readable. The downsides are the lack of any input method, and the fact that there’s no speaker or microphone. I also missed having menstrual tracking, as far more affordable options than the Realme Watch S Pro do offer this, and it can be very useful for women to have that data easily accessible. Also, the interface is minimalist and lacks some important touches such as being able to access music controls while working out. It is important to remember that Realme has only just entered the wearables space this year, and some of these things might be addressed with software updates as the company learns what users want.
Slow GPS connectivity was an issue that was consistent throughout my time with the Realme Watch S Pro. If built-in GPS is not much of a deal-breaker for you, the Realme Watch S could also be considered, since it comes at a much lower price of Rs. 4,999. If you swim regularly, the Realme Watch S Pro is a good option to consider as it’s priced very aggressively, and is even less expensive than the Mi Watch Revolve (priced at Rs. 10,999).
How to find the best deals during online sales? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.