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Lenovo Watch X Plus – A minimal hybrid smart watch

Smart watches are a pretty normal thing at the moment. The bugbear though is their battery life. Apart from the likes of Pebble and Amazfit Bip, most smartwatches offer a day or 2 at the most. A great way to offer more battery life has been offered in the form of hybrid watches. A smartwatch with an analog display that also has a screen below. While relatively unknown in the UK and west, Lenovo are a player in this game, and the Watch X Plus is a great example of one such watch. With 45 days of battery life, a heart rate sensor and an LCD display, this is a great watch for those who want to keep a tab on their fitness and notifications but don’t want to worry about plugging it in constantly.

Lenovo Watch X Plus – Features

  • Analog display which can be controlled and calibrated via app. Even when the watch is off, the time is their for you to read.
  • Heart rate monitor, for real-time feedback.
  • Sleep monitor, tracking the quality of your sleep.
  • Alarm – wake yourself up via vibration.
  • Remote camera – use the watch as a remote shutter for your phone’s camera.
  • Anti-Lost – use it to ring your phone. It can also alert you if your phone ever goes out of range.
  • Up to 45 day battery life.
  • Waterproof
  • Compatible with iOS and Android
  • 24.50 x 4.25 x 1.22 cm, 81gm

Look and Feel

The Lenovo Watch X Plus is pretty stylish. With a sapphire glass front, a beautiful metal weaved strap and good striking colours, this is designed to impress. In fact, you would be forgiven to just think it was a stylish watch instead of a smartwatch.

The front offers the analog time, with a screen hidden in the bottom half of the screen. It is unnoticeable when the display is off, and only visible when it is on. This makes it pretty good, once again for when you do not want to care about the smart features.

More so, the display is ‘glow in the dark’, so you don’t have to even worry about using a light to see it at night.

Since I use my watch around my sleeping baby, this feature was particularly important to me.

At 1.22 cm, it is pretty thick. This is pretty common for most watches with a heart rate monitor built in.

Setup

The Lenovo Watch X Plus comes with a Chinese manual, with plenty of pics, so you can just about manage. Generally speaking, head to your app store for Android/iOS, and look for the Lenovo Watch app.

Funnily, the app shows you an advert for the watch you have as you load it up.

Once the app has loaded, hit the watch symbol in the top right corner to bring up the watch setup screen.

In there, hit ‘Click to connect the watch’. Make sure the watch is on and the charge is above 25%. Once your watch is found (in a few seconds, so pretty quick), you have to shake your Watch X Plus or press the button on it to complete pairing. From there on, you are pretty good to go.

If you did lose connection, it will happily pair again.

Once connected, you can adjust settings such as language (default is Chinese), notifications, remote shutter, syncing time, etc.

However, if the Watch X Plus turns off, some of the settings go back to default, such as the language goes back to Chinese.

Syncing time

Syncing/calibrating time on the Watch X Plus is pretty cool. When you click this feature, you will see the needles go around randomly (I thought it was random). Once they set, you enter what time you see on the watch. With this information, the watch needles will then turn around and calibrate themselves to the correct time. Generally speaking, seeing your watch needles just whirl around is a pretty cool feature and definitely makes one feel like a Time Lord!

Single button use

The watch is pretty much a single button use. In order to wake up the display, you can have it set to ‘raise to wake’, or simply press the button.

Once the button is pressed, you get a rolling display. For example, on a single press, you get the date, then it scrolls to time, and then temperature, and then it turns off. If you press it again, you can monitor your heart rate. Press it again, and you have the option to activate various activities that you want monitored, like running or swimming.

Press again and you get to settings which allows you to find your phone, and shows the software version.

Simple, basic, and intuitive.

Fitness logging

As mentioned above, just scroll to activate a fitness activity. It also measures your steps and heart rate. This can then be synced with the likes of Apple or Android Health apps. However, if you do turn the watch off and on again, this data is lost.

I felt like my phone logged more steps than my watch when I tested it, though they were within a ballpark.

Sleep logging

Sleep is also automatically logged. It gives you the quality of your sleep, whether you are in REM or deep sleep, or awake. If you do wake up for longer than around 15 minutes, the earlier data is lost and you only get the last chunk. This was a problem if our little one woke up and we had to spend any time in getting the wee one back to sleep.

The sleep data does not sync with other apps.

Notifications

This was a funny one. It is pretty easy to set these up for calls, texts and a set number of third party apps, such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, etc. It worked to begin with on iOS, but then nothing I did made it work again. I tried the usual resets, deleting app and setting it up again, and unpair and repair.

However, when moved to Android, it worked a treat. I think the way iOS is set up, this could be a problem as some security thing may have kicked in, despite me allowing it as much access as I could give it.

So yeah, Android, great. iOS, not so much.

You see notifications on the little screen and messages scroll up so you can read them a little bit. However, for all intents and purposes, this lets you know whether you should reach your phone or not, instead of replacing your phone.

Temperature is not compatible in the UK

The Watch X Plus  is supposed to give you the temperature but the feature did not work in the UK. I imagine it may be tuned to work just in China. Since the watch is not officially available in the UK, we may not have access to the temperature servers yet.

Turns off below 25%

Battery life is the main highlight of the Lenovo Watch X Plus. 45 days of standby life is pretty awesome, and if you use the smart features, you still easily get around 30 odd days. A charge a month is easy and great, so definitely a win.

The watch does turn itself off when the battery life drops below 25%. This is probably to make sure that the time feature keeps running for another week or so in case you were on holiday and without charge.

More information

More information on the Lenovo Watch X Plus can be found on the Gearbest website.

It currently retails for £70.69, making it a cheaper option compared to other hybrid smart watches such as the Nokia Steel HR.

There is currently a 23% discount on the watch which runs out in 13 days. The discounted price is just north of £50!

Verdict

It looks good, it has an awesome battery life and it is reasonably priced. What’s not to like!

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