For fitness trackers and wearable tech you've got so many options these days. Today I’m taking a look at a budget smartwatch from Kogan.
This is the Kogan Active Plus Smart Watch. I’m going to show you all the different features of this smart watch and talk to you about any pros or cons that you might want to know before you spend your money on this watch.
There are some custom watch faces that you can set with this smart watch and I’m going to show you all the different faces towards the end of the video so keep watching.
Let's get started.
You can purchase this smart watch directly from the Kogan website but you could also try Amazon or eBay to see if there's any versions there.
The watch itself comes in this small white box.
Opening up the box you'll find the following items inside; one Kogan Active Plus Smart watch. You also get black watch wrist straps. You get the USB charging device and you get a Quick Start instruction manual.
The watch comes with a small protective sticker and this is easily removed. The wrist strap that's included is black and it's easy to install.
You can purchase red or blue straps from the Kogan website if you're not happy with the black strap.
While the device is 3.5 centimeters by around 4 centimeters, the actual screen is smaller than this.
You can see that the bezel takes up a bit of space around the watch, particularly at the bottom here.
The watch itself does feel quite solid. It's made from a rigid, black plastic. This LCD screen is a touch screen; there are two buttons here, one on each side of the watch but most of the controls are done using the touchscreen.
In order to charge up the watch, you do have to use the specific charging clip that came in the box.
The watch clips into the charger pretty easily and you can plug the USB into a power outlet or even just a free USB slot on your computer.
This battery when fully charged is advertised to last between 10 and 15 days. With real world use, you could probably expect to get maybe a week out of this before it needs charging which is pretty good.
The charging cable is around 35 centimeters in length; it's pretty short.
One of the reasons that the battery lasts as long as it does is because when compared to the more high-end top-of-the-range smart watches you can buy, the features on this watch are much more basic.
So this is a pro and a con because you do want a longer battery life; it's annoying having to charge your watch every day or every second day, but you are missing out on some of those extra features like being able to customize the watch faces.
You can't do that as much with this watch as you can with a high-end watch.
When you're not actively using the watch, the watch face will deactivate and switch itself off.
To reactivate the watch, you just need to bring your arm up into a position that you'd normally use to look at the screen.
You can see here I am comparing the Kogan watch with the Samsung watch.
When I twist my wrist to bring up the screen, the Kogan watch is a bit slower and less responsive than the Samsung watch but it still works every time.
You can also wake up the watch manually by pressing either of the two buttons on each side of the device.
If you press both of those buttons together for a couple of seconds, it'll start tracking exercise.
This is the default watch face that comes pre-installed. You've got the date in the top left and the day of the week. In the right corner you have the battery indicator.
You can switch between viewing number of steps, kilometers travelled or calories burned just by tapping on the screen like this.
One thing that does annoy me. If you're not wearing this watch and you've got it down on the table for example, the heart sensor will start flashing every now and then and it's really bright and quite annoying.
To set up the watch and to track your health stats, you'll need to download an app called Very Fit Pro.
Using the app you can change some settings on the watch including how and when you'd like to receive notification.
Your watch will vibrate and you can scroll up to view and read the message.
If you swipe down you can scroll through some of the fitness stats live on the watch.
Swiping left will give you four different options. You can turn on or off the heart rate monitor with this button here.
You can also turn wrist activation on or off. Pressing this moon will turn the device to Do Not Disturb
and the last symbol here can actually be used to locate your phone.
Press this button and your phone will ring or vibrate and you should be able to locate your phone as long as it's in range.
The watch is waterproof up to a rating of 5ATM, so you can wear this in the shower, the swimming pool but not necessarily at the beach.
It wouldn't do so well with salty water.
If you want to do exercise, you can select a sport here that you're about to start and there's a few different options to choose from.
The heart button will manually start to measure your heart rate, and this relax button will talk you through some relaxing breathing exercises.
From this screen you can also control and set alarms that you'd like to have set on the watch.
You are stuck with these default watch face settings, there's not like an App store with hundreds of different watch faces.
Let's have a look at all the different watch faces that are included with this watch.
Hey guys, I’ve just been on a nice long walk and I’m wearing two smart watches.
I’ve got the Kogan Active Plus Smart Watch here on one hand and the Samsung Smart Watch on the other hand.
So I should be able to check how well this watch has recorded my steps when compared to the much more expensive Samsung watch.
Let's go home and have a look at the results.
Okay, so definitely the Kogan watch wasn't recording all the steps that I did on that walk.
If you're gonna say which of these two watches is more accurate, it's definitely the more expensive Samsung watch.
The difference was so big that it's obvious to me that this Kogan watch is not accurately recording the number of steps that you're doing in a day.
It could be that the steps are freezing and then restarting again, whatever it is, it's not accurate.
Because of this inaccuracy, it's really hard for me to recommend this smart watch.
Even though it's cheap and on the surface it does look like it's got a lot of features for a pretty low price.
That's pretty much it for this one.
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Thank you for watching. I'll see you next time.