realme TechLife Watch R100 Review


realme under its TechLife brand launched the Watch R100, a budget smartwatch, in India last month. It has a 1.32-inch color LCD full-touch display, comes with a speaker and microphone for voice calling capabilities, Alexa voice assistant, and promises up to 7 days of battery life. I have been using the smartwatch from realme for a couple of weeks now, and here is the review.

Box Contents

  • realme TechLife Watch R100 in Black colour
  • Magnetic charging cable
Design and Build

The Watch R100 has a round design that seen in most smartwatches. It measures 262×46×14mm and weighs 46 grams with the strap. The smartwatch has IP68 water resistance. There is Accelerometer, 24h Heart Rate Monitor and SpO2 Sensor. It uses Bluetooth 5.2 to connect to Android and iOS devices.

Coming to the strap, it has a lightweight 22mm interchangeable strap that is made of skin-friendly material, and the quality of the strap is good.

There are two buttons on the right side. The function button on the  lets you wake up the watch, go back and open the menu. The next button launches exercise or sports options.

On the back, you can see the heart rate and SpO2 sensors that have glowing green and Red LED lights when you are using it to measure heart rate and blood oxygen.

Display and features

Coming to the display, the realme TechLife Watch R100 has a 1.32-inch (360 x 360 pixels) 385 PPI LCD glass colour touch screen. You can set it to turn on when you lift your hand, and the screen turns off in a few seconds to save power. Touch screen is smooth to use. Outdoor visibility is good since it has up to 450 nits brightness  You can adjust the brightness from the brightness bar that comes up when you swipe from the bottom, but there is an auto brightness option that you can set from the app.

There is also an easy notification shade option when you swipe from the bottom. This has DND, raise to wake, mute, find my phone, flashlight option that brightens up the screen and settings, alarm, music control and a shortcut to settings.

Pressing the function button shows activity, exercise, Alexa, heart rate, sleep, blood oxygen, stress, breath training, even reminder, phone, clock and weather. A recent update has removed the Alexa option, even though there is an option in the app. However, there is an Alexa watch face that lets you launch it.

When you swipe from the top, you can read or clear the notification you receive from the smartphone, but you can’t reply to them.  You can swipe them one by one or clear them completely.

Bluetooth Calling

The main highlight of the smartwatch is the built-in calling feature, since it has a microphone and a speaker. It shows call log, and there is even a dial pad, in addition to contacts option which you can add from the app.

Calling experience is good indoors, and the microphone is able to pick up the voice well, and the the speaker output is loud enough. However, it is not that clear, if you are in noisy outdoors.

Alexa

You need to set up Alexa from the app by connecting it to your Amazon account, and the company says that it is still in beta. Once it is done, you can ask it for weather forecast, set up an alarm or timer, and also ask general questions.

It takes few seconds to communicate to the service since it gathers the data from the app over Bluetooth, but the results are perfect. Hope we can expect the company to add shortcuts, including quick launch button shortcuts for Alexa from the company in the future.

Software

The watch uses the realme Wear companion app on Android and iPhone instead of the usual realme Link app or the realme Fit app. It shows activity details in the home screen along with heart rate data, sleep data and blood oxygen record. The exercise tab shows workout details, and the device management tab shows the battery status and offers more customization.

There are a lot of watch faces to choose from, but only a few options show a lot of data such as steps, heart rate, calories burnt, weather and other details. There is a custom dial option that lets you add a custom image.

In the settings you can select call reminders, notifications from the preferred apps, health reminders such as 24-hour HR monitoring, SpO2 monitoring stand up reminders, Water reminder, sedentary reminder and more. However, there is no option to sync your data to realme servers so that you can’t get back the data if you switch to a new phone. It also lacks Google fit or Strava sync for workouts.

Fitness and sleep tracking

The realme TechLife Watch R100 has 100+ Sports modes including Outdoor Running and Walking with automatic tracking, Outdoor Riding, Cricket, Swimming, Yoga, Rower, Elliptical, HIIT and more

For outdoor activities, you get all the details such as distance, calories burnt, average heart rate and more. Since the watch doesn’t have GPS, you can use the phone’s GPS, but doesn’t lock properly, and when you start your run directly from the watch, it doesn’t track routs and takes data only based on steps, so there is some difference when compared to GPS watches. This is common in budget watches.

Sleep tracking shows light and deep sleep, awake time, as well as REM sleep. Tracking is good, but not the best. It also shows the breathing quality.

Heart rate, SpO2 and stress monitoring

The smartwatch uses LED lights and photo-diodes to illuminate the blood vessel for a while and monitors the heart rate via the change of green light absorbed, and it uses red light for SpO2 or blood oxygen monitoring. You can’t say this is 100% accurate. Heart rate recordings — both resting and active, and SpO2 readings are decent compared to oximeter. It also shows stress data.

Battery life

The Watch has a 380mAh battery, and the company promises up to 7 days of battery life with 24h heart rate tracking on. During my use of a couple of weeks, I charged it only once with minimal use. I used it for daily run tracking for about 40 minutes, set brightness to auto and take one or two calls over Bluetooth. Battery life might vary depending on frequent use of the display with increased brightness, use of heart rate monitor during workouts, calling and all the notifications turned on.

It has a magnetic charging dock that you can even plug it in a USB port of a PC or a laptop or use power bank in low-power mode. It takes about 2 hours to charge the watch fully from 0%. Since the battery lasts for close to a week, long charging time doesn’t matter.

Conclusion

The realme TechLife Watch R100 is a decent smartwatch with voice calling under Rs. 4000. It has a large colour touch screen with a lot of watch faces, comes with voice calling capabilities offers a good battery life. The realme wear app needs work, most importantly, a cloud sync feature to store your data when you switch devices.

The realme TechLife Watch R100 is priced at Rs. 3999, and is available from realme.com and Flipkart.

Pros

  • Bright 1.32″ touch display
  • Good design and build
  • Voice calling and Alexa support
  • Good battery life

Cons

  • No cloud sync for realme Fit app
  • Activity tracking are not accurate

Author: Srivatsan Sridhar

Srivatsan Sridhar is a Mobile Technology Enthusiast who is passionate about Mobile phones and Mobile apps. He uses the phones he reviews as his main phone. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram