PLAY, an Indian start-up popular for its accessories, launched the PLAYFIT SLIM2C with a stylish design, Bluetooth calling and leather strap today. I have been using the smartwatch for a week now. Let us check out the review to find out what it has to offer.
Box Contents
- PLAYFIT SLIM2C in Black colour
- Magnetic charging cable
- User manual
Design and Build
The watch has a circular dial and Zn-alloy casing in black that offers a premium and stylish look. It also comes in champagne colour with a matching strap. The smartwatch has IP67 ratings for dust and water resistance. There is Accelerometer, 24h Heart Rate and SpO2 monitoring. It uses Bluetooth 5.0 to connect to Android and iOS devices.
It weighs about 55 grams with the strap. The watch comes with a 22mm interchangeable strap that has a leather finish. This is a single button on the right side that lets you go to the home screen or back. Wish the button was a bit protruding, since the flush finish requires the button to be pushed hard to register. The speaker grill is present on the other side.
The leather finish for the strap offer a premium look and feel and there is a stainless steel buckle.
Display
Coming to the display, the watch has a 1.28-inch (240×240 pixels) 265 PPI LCD glass colour touch screen. The company says it has toughened glass, but the glass is prone to tiny scratches. You can see large bezels around the display.
You can set it to turn on the screen when you lift your hand, and the screen turns off in a few seconds to save power, but there is no option to extend the screen timeout limit. The touch screen is smooth to use and has up to 500 nits brightness, so visibility is good even in bright outdoors.
Swiping from the top shows the quick settings panel that has several options such as ‘Theater mode’ that turns off vibration and turns the brightness down, brightness adjustment toggle that lets you adjust it from level 1 till 5, DND, weather and settings. There is no auto brightness adjustment since it lacks an ambient light sensor. During night, level 2 is good, and level 5 is needed for daytime or outdoors.
There is also an easy notification shade option when you swipe from the bottom. You can’t clear individual notification, and the only way is to clear all. You can read the notifications, but can’t reply to them.
Swiping from the left shows all the features that include steps, sleep, heart rate, workout, phone, SpO2, Weather, camera control, music control, and settings. The settings option has stopwatch, alarm, reset, power off and more options.
Bluetooth Calling
The main highlight of the smartwatch is the built-in calling feature, since it has a microphone and a speaker. You need to connect the watch as a Bluetooth headset before making calls. It shows call log, and there is even a dial pad, in addition to contacts option.
You can store 8 contacts in the watch and view call logs. Calling experience is good when you use it indoors, and the microphone is able to pick up the voice well, and speaker output is also loud, thanks to EBEL speakers, but it could have been a bit louder outdoors.
Software / App
It runs proprietary software compatible with both Android and iOS (8.0+) running Android (4.0+). Pairing the device with your mobile phone is pretty much easy where you need to install “Playfit” app from Google Play Store or App Store. It also asks you to register an account, and you will also have to fill your physical details, such as height, weight, gender and birth year.
It has separate sections. The first one shows activity details, sleep and heart rate and heart rate tracking with data that is shown on the second section that also offers data for 7 days, 15 days and 30 days.
The settings option lets you set notification alerts, music control, find your watch and set favourite contact to call. Others option has a lot of options include on screen time limit (5, 10 or 10 sec), camera control and time format. Alert settings have call alert and alarm.
The account settings let you manage your profile, check for update, set target, track weight, change password on log out. There are several cloud watch faces in the app, but most faces look kiddish.
Fitness and sleep tracking
The watch has 9 workout modes that include Walking, Running, Cycling, Skipping, Badminton, Basketball, Football, Climbing and Tennis. Steps and workout tracking is decent. When you launch the running mode from the watch directly, it doesn’t get the GPS data from the app, instead it uses the steps to track, so the data is not 100% correct compared to other smartwatches which use dedicated GPS, but it is still decent. Sleep tracking is decent, but it only shows deep sleep, light sleep and awake data, and doesn’t show REM sleep data.
Heart rate and SpO2 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. Heart rate data is fine when compared to other models, and the SpO2 or blood oxygen data is also decent compared to Oximeter. There is no SpO2 option in the app, and it is present only in the watch.
Battery life
The smartwatch has a 300mAh battery, and the company promises up to 5 days of battery life with calling and up to 15 days standby time. With mixed use of calling occasionally for a few days, I got about 7 days of battery life, which is good. This might vary depending on frequent use of the display with increased brightness, use of the heart rate monitor, frequent use of calling feature and all the notifications turned on. It takes about 2 and half hours to charge the watch fully.
Conclusion
The PLAYFIT SLIM2C is a decent smartwatch with calling capabilities over Bluetooth, priced under Rs. 4000. The calling capabilities and the build quality for the watch is good, but the company could work on improving the workout tracking by getting GPS from the phone during outdoor activities, and adding more watch faces.
The smartwatch is available from worldofplay website for Rs. 3,999 and on Amazon.in it is even cheaper at Rs. 3499.