Realme has recently launched its smartwatch S5 in India which is currently selling at Rs 7,499 on the company’s official website. Interestingly, several smartwatches are present in the market from some notable brands. This one looks premium and is claimed to offer various advanced fitness tracking features. Moreover, the watch offers a bright AMOLED display and a decent battery life under Rs 8,000.
I used the smartwatch for sometime to find out whether this watch fits at this price point. Let’s dive into the review to know all about its design, pricing, features and more.
What’s Inside The Box
Apart from the smartwatch, the box comes with documentation and a round magnetic watch charger without a cable.
Design And Display
This smartwatch actually looks premium in hand. It comes with a round watch design with a single rotating crown. It gets two more buttons. Its body is built of aluminium alloy and it offers Panda Glass protection. I received the Sand White colour unit. It also comes in a Rock Grey colour. I liked the White colour variant more as it highlights the ceramic-style finish in a better way than the black one. It is noteworthy that the watch comes with silica gel which often makes the device prone to sweat especially in summers and humid weather.
The Realme S5 Watch feels lightweight and weighs around 33 gm while its strap weighs nearly 17 gm. When it comes to the display, the bezels are thin; however, the outer white ring appears noticeable and makes the watch bumpy. It is prone to scratches. The rotating crown works well while scrolling and provides haptic feedback. This wearable supports 5 ATM water resistance.
In terms of the brightness, the watch features a 1.43-inch AMOLED panel with a 455×466 resolution with a 60Hz refresh rate and a peak brightness of 1500nits. I am impressed with the display quality and the brightness. Outdoors, the visibility is good and auto brightness settings work decently. Users also get five manual brightness levels and an always-on display. Moreover, the smartwatch comes with a Smart Might Vision that automatically switches the watch face into a red theme during the usage at night.
The overall colours in the watch look sharp and natural. Moreover, the on-paper specs of the wearable matches the real-world experience. When it comes to the watch faces, you could be a bit unsatisfied with it. This smartwatch offers nearly 100 watch faces available through the Realme Link app, though most of them do not support customisation. Additionally, you may also find the syncing process slightly slow. Opening the watch face options may take time to refresh and applying a watch face is again slow. This watch stores up to 12 watch faces locally.
Notifications And Smart Features
Notifications is another segment where you might feel something is incomplete. Users can get notifications from apps like WhatsApp and more. However, there is barely any room for customisation available for we may see notifications behave. Moreover, there are no options to configure notification priority or delivery behaviour based on whether the smartphone is in use.
Moreover, the watch also sometimes misses images and emojis inside notifications. The ability to reply is also limited. Realme has advertised smart voice reply support; however, it was difficult to rely on them on a regular basis. While bluetooth calling actually performed better than my expectation. Voices sounded crisp and the built-in microphone also decently works well.
The Realme Watch S5 offers blood oxygen tracking, heart rate monitoring, sleep cycle tracking, stress monitoring and support for more than 110 sports modes. Sleep monitoring is a key part of the health suite. This device can detect naps well and offers sleep stage breakdowns which involves REM sleep, deep sleep and resting heart rate during sleep sessions. For me, the sleep monitoring worked reasonably well.
Heart rate and SpO2 tracking also worked decently. However, readings could fluctuate here and there sometime during the workout sessions. Step tracking was also felt to be slightly inconsistent a few times.
As per my experience, the GPS workout tracking works decently well and you can easily read metrics like heart rate, pace and distance during activities. The company also focuses on features like aerobic training effect monitoring, pacing guidance, metronome support and running partner modes. Overall, the workout accuracy was average and the device has scope of improvement for fitness tracking.
Battery Life
Speaking of the battery, it is one of the advantages of the smartwatch. With heart rate monitoring enabled, turned on notifications, sleep tracking active and always-on display, the watch could easily last around six days. Yes, you can get more battery life when the AOD is disabled. Once you disable the battery saving features, you can use it for around 10 days as well. This is something close to the smartwatches in the similar price bracket.
When it comes to charging, the smartwatch may take nearly three hours to be fully charged, which is quite slow. The Watch S5 comes with a proprietary magnetic charging connected through a USB Type-C. Notably, the magnetic attachment was also a bit disappointing as it was slightly weaker than expected.
Final verdict
The Realme Watch S5 is a device that offers good hardware. One of the highlights of this smartwatch is its display. It is bright and smooth. The GPS of the watch works decently well and the watch gives a premium in-hand feel. Moreover, when it comes to Bluetooth calling, it gets full points for it.
However, software is something where you may not be totally satisfied with it. Syncing failures and slightly off fitness tracking could be its weaknesses.
If you need a smartwatch for casual use where the watch should come with a bright display, decent battery life, clear bluetooth calling and not much reliance on health and sports features, then it is a decent option under Rs 8,000.
