A lot of smartwatches in India are launching within the budget segment, and Inbase is one of those companies that want to offer customers a value for money watch. For that purpose, the brand launched the Urban Fit S in India in July, which is priced at Rs 4,999. While it is a pretty hefty price tag for smartwatches in this segment, can the Urban Fit S prove itself to be actually value for money?
Design & Comfort
The Urban Fit S has been made using Zinc Alloy casing, and the company claims that it has a soft, skin-friendly silicone strap. There’s a button to the right alongside a crown and a speaker at the left. The square-shaped dial definitely resembles the Apple watch in all ways. Moreover, the crown has a red circle inside the crown which adds to the looks of the watch. The button on the right isn’t very clicky though and doesn’t give proper feedback when you press it. Overall, it looks premium when one is wearing it.
Furthermore, the silicone strap of the watch is very comfortable and feels soft on the skin. It doesn’t have a lot of holes, and the strap length is kind of short for my liking because I wasn’t able to wear it in a way which felt suitable. Either it was too tight or too loose. Apart from that, I didn’t have any issues with the watch’s comfort.
The watch has an Always-On 1.78’’ AMOLED Display with good colour reproduction. It gets bright in outdoor conditions, but you might have visibility issues if the sun directly shines on the display. The touch responsiveness is optimum, and the text looks sharp as well. The always-on display functionality also works well, but the brightness could have been better. Also, there was no way to change the style of the Always-on display clock.
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Software, Performance, & Battery Life
The Urban Fit S supports 100+ watch faces and has features like Find my Device, Camera and Music Controls, DIY Watch Face, a Calculator, a Flashlight, and Weather Forecasts. In terms of the Fitness app, the Urban Fit S comes with Urban Health Suit, which can monitor Heart Rate, Sleep Monitoring, Blood Pressure, and Blood Oxygen. Women can also track their menstrual cycles with the Physiological Cycle Reminder App. One can also set reminders for Sedentary and Hydration alerts.
Urban Fit S supports calling functionality so that it can make and receive calls directly from the smartwatch and audio can be heard via an in-built HD speaker. The smartwatch also comes with in-built memory, which can be used to store music tracks.
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When paired with the ‘Da Fit’ app, you can control a bunch of features such as Watch faces, notification settings, Alarms, camera shutter, various kinds of reminders and more, however, the App isn’t very user-friendly and it needs updates. At times, it just fails to connect to the watch, and I had to remove it from within the app to connect to it again. Sometimes the settings I changed from within the app didn’t sync with the watch. The reminders worked fine without any issues when they got synced to the watch.
Next, as mentioned, the Urban Fit S supports Bluetooth calling, which impressed me. However, it connects to the phone as an audio device, meaning if you play music while being connected to the watch, the phone will play music via the watch. Not only this but every type of audio is then routed to the phone. This was really inconvenient as I am used to the Galaxy Watch 4, which doesn’t behave this way and can be used only for calls. Also, the speaker’s performance isn’t very loud, while the mic is pretty average as the person couldn’t always hear me clearly.
Apart from that, the performance of the watch itself is snappy. The button on the right acts as a back button, while the crown can be used to scroll through menus. The crown on the right has a really satisfying noise to it when you rotate it. One thing I didn’t like about the watch is the vibration motor as it makes more sound than vibration and actually feels cheap.
Sports tracking works as it should and supports a bunch of those modes. During a half an hour session of walking, the watch recorded 2582 steps and 95 burnt calories with a distance of 1 mile. It recorded a 121 bpm heart rate and continuously tracks it when you are working out. When compared to the Galaxy Watch 4, the steps and heart rate were in line but then the calories burnt calculated seemed a bit off.
As for the battery life, Inbase claims that the smartwatch charges within 120 Minutes and one can get upto 15 Days with Notifications only, up to 5 Days with standard use and Always On Display disabled, or up to 3 days with all features on and Always On Display enabled. These numbers seemed accurate, and with my usage, which remained minimal, I could easily get the 12-day mark.