Smartwatches are handy tools (literally) that are a better version of traditional watches which only show you time. These have evolved past showing you just time and making your life easy by being your companion throughout a workout or during a day full of work to keep track of notifications, calls and everything else. While watches like Apple Watch are way too expensive and are not compatible with every phone, watches like the Urban Play from Inbase tend to burn a smaller hole in your pocket with a tag of just Rs 3,999. Let’s take a look at what it has to offer and is it worth the price.
Design, Comfort & Display
The Urban Play Smartwatch from Inbase has a zinc alloy housing to make it feel premium, and fortunately, it does feel so and isn’t much heavy to wear either. Unfortunately, the bezels have the numbers and an odd-looking “Smartwatch” branding which I didn’t like. It would have been better if there were numbers instead because the red accent does look stylish. In addition, the Watch is IP68 water and dust resistant for enhanced durability.
Moving on, there’s a 20mm silicone strap that feels soft to the touch and is also comfortable to wear. There are a bunch of holes available on the strap, so you have many options to keep it tight or loose. Finally, a single circular button on the right acts as a power button and turns on/off the screen.
There’s a 1.3-inch full touch screen display with a 360 x 360 pixels resolution. The display gets plenty bright outdoors, so there’s good visibility of the contents on the screen. The text, however, looks a bit odd, and the font seems to be inspired by those old video games.
In short, it doesn’t look much appealing and would have looked much more modern if it was Sans-serif or a related font. However, the touch works fine and is responsive as well. The Watch also has a vibration motor that is strong enough to let you know about a call or a notification.
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Performance, Features, & Battery Backup
Equipped with a Realtek chipset, the Watch comes with its custom OS that provides many features. These include a total of 7 sports modes, a plethora of watch faces, step count, sedentary reminder, music control, SpO2 and heart rate monitor and even more. In addition, there are a bunch of watches faces available within the App to choose from. However, syncing them to watch takes a bit of time as it downloads the same on the Watch once you decide to apply it.
In terms of performance, I would say it was average. The touch was responsive, but the animations were terrible. I could even notice a glitch constantly while switching between screens. It always looked like the Watch was lagging while scrolling through notifications or menus. You can swipe down from the top on the watch face to quick access settings. Through here, you can turn on or off the vibration, check the battery level, and access other functions.
The notification sync on the Watch can be turned on via the Da Fit app. It gives you access to a host of features including toggling continuous heart rate monitoring, additional watch faces, drink water reminders, and physiological reminders. The Watch is suitable for women as well because you can track your menstrual cycles, pregnancy conditioning and more.
The notification sync works accurately, but sometimes, it couldn’t fetch the notification and showed a ‘preparing’ prompt. Because of this, I did miss out on some of the important notifications. Moreover, you can control which apps send notifications to your Watch via the app. The Watch can also act as a camera shutter for the smartphone it is linked with.
The Watch has a raise to wake feature available, which wasn’t the best, in my opinion. It often turned on the screen even when I didn’t want it to, which was annoying at times. Ironically, sometimes when I did raise my wrist to take a look at the time, the screen didn’t turn on. So it’s a hit and miss kind of situation which this feature.
Heart rate tracking as well as blood oxygen monitoring detected everything quickly and were accurate to some extent. For workouts, I mainly tried out walking and for a 30-minute session, the Watch registered about 1100 steps. It also monitors your heart rate alongside monitoring other aspects of the workout. The Watch further gets a breathing and stress monitor as well.
All in all, the Urban Play is filled with health tracking features and does the job decently. Talking about battery life, In base claims a runtime of up to 5 – 7 days. The battery life for every person will vary per their usage, but for a casual workout along with notification sync and high brightness, you can easily stretch the battery for more than 5 days. However, it may drain quickly if you are into hardcore workouts daily. It took almost 2 hours to charge the Watch from 0 to 100 with the magnetic PIN charger that snaps onto the back of the Urban Play watch.