Key Takeaways
1. Budget Constraints: The author wanted a smartwatch with basic features and aimed for a price around €50, as most options from established brands start at €100.
2. Affordable Choice: The author purchased a low-cost smartwatch from Aliexpress for €17–25, which offered a round design, IP68 rating, and alarm functionality.
3. Battery Life Performance: The budget smartwatch surprisingly provided good battery life, lasting about a week and a half on a single charge.
4. Alarm Functionality Issues: The watch had a significant flaw in its alarm feature, failing to vibrate and only playing a loud melody, despite settings indicating otherwise.
5. Reliability Concerns: The experience highlighted the unreliability of ultra-cheap smartwatches, suggesting that low prices may lead to poor functionality and performance.
After my old Amazfit Bip Lite became too worn out to wear publicly, it was time to find a replacement. I wanted a round design, long battery life, and the ability to set alarms directly on the watch — that’s all I really needed. Most recent models, even those from Amazfit, cost around €100 (the Amazfit Active 2 is available for $80 on Amazon’s Black Friday). I was hoping to find something closer to €50, as my watch doesn’t need to do much. As I mentioned in a recent opinion piece: smartwatches are often “overpriced, overstuffed, and intrusive!”
Searching for Budget Options
Since established brands currently don’t offer genuinely affordable options (as noted — choices pretty much start at €100), I decided to check out Aliexpress. Eventually, I caved and ordered the “LLIGE Bluetooth Call Women Smart Watch Men Sport Fitness Watches Heart Rate Health Monitor Smartwatch for Android iOS”: it has a nice-looking round screen, IP68 (which I don’t intend to test), and alarms on the touchscreen. The cost? €17–25!
Specifications and Initial Impressions
The only spec that seemed a bit dodgy was battery life, but I was okay with that — same goes for the not-so-great Da Fit app, which I wanted to avoid anyway. A few days later, the watch showed up.
After using it for several days, my experience was mixed. Sadly, one major downside was significant enough that I started looking again — more on that later.
Battery Life Surprises
I was pleasantly surprised by the battery life of this budget model. On a single charge, the 230 mAh battery lasted about a week and a half with my light usage — and it’s still showing around half capacity. This gives me hope that other models might also last longer than expected when used lightly. The touchscreen worked better than I thought it would.
If privacy is important to you, this might not be good news — many inexpensive smartwatches lack any open-source companion app alternatives. Gadgetbridge supposedly works for some models, but it didn’t recognize mine. The default app, Da Fit, isn’t the best and probably isn’t very privacy-friendly.
Alarm Functionality Issues
The worst part is that you must use it at least once, as there’s no way to set the time directly on the watch. A one-time sync with a smartphone is required.
Up to that point, though, things seemed fine. I thought I had found an affordable watch with decent looks, excellent battery life, and on-device alarms. The watch faces were quite limited and mostly unimpressive, but I found one I liked — it resembled an electricity meter.
And then the watch let me down with a basic function: the alarm. There seems to be a bug — the watch allows you to set an alarm directly on the device, but instead of vibrating, it blared a painfully loud melody at me the next morning.
In the settings, under “Vibrate & Ring,” you can choose whether the watch should vibrate, vibrate and ring, or stay silent — but this feature appears to be broken. No matter what I select, the watch won’t vibrate and just plays the loud ringtone. There’s also no way to change this in the app. The feature is simply bugged. My only hope is for a firmware update.
Final Thoughts
I expected a €17 smartwatch to let me down with its battery life, looks, or cheap build quality. Instead, it failed at a function I thought every smartwatch could manage: a silent wrist vibration for an alarm. Maybe I was just unlucky, and other models don’t have this problem.
But it brings to light the main issue with ultra-cheap Aliexpress watches and similar products: you can’t depend on them to function correctly — much less last over time. As the saying goes: buy cheap, buy twice.
If any major brands were to provide a well-made, reliable, and fairly priced alternative, I’d definitely be interested. Until then, I’ll likely wait for a sale that brings a more advanced mainstream smartwatch into my budget. To be continued…
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