After establishing itself as a successful smartphone brand in India, thanks to the aggressive pricing Realme makes, Realme seems to be focussing on increasing its range of products in the Indian market. The company has already shared its plan for this year, and the plan includes – smart TVs, smartwatch, speakers and many more, but the fitness tracker is the one, to begin with.
Realme has launched its fitness tracker – Realme Band in India for 1499INR and as its name suggests, it is equipped with all those traditional sensors needed to record your fitness activities and calorie expend. Realme Band in India will be competing against Mi Band 3, Mi Band 4, Honor Band 5 and Honor Band 5i. But, since, all of these are priced higher than it, Realme Band is the more affordable of them all.
So, is Realme Band the best affordable smart band yet? Has Realme succeeded in escalating the same magic it did with its smartphones? And the most important question of them all, is Realme Band worth buying? We are going to dig it all, today.
Before diving down to the complete review here is the complete specification of the Realme band at one place for the convenience.
Realme band is very sleek in design, it is thin and minimalistic, yet it looks good and premium. the main body itself is curved and the curve sits perfectly over the wrist, making it comfortable to wear for a long time without noticing any heft. The Device itself weighs just 20 gm, and weight distribution is well balanced.
Straps are made up of TPU material which gives it a plastic-like touch while they are nowhere as classic as silicon straps, they certainly do feel more rigid. Straps is being offered in three color variants - black, olive green and yellow, moreover, they have got a lot of punch holes for better grip adjustment for wrists with different girth.
The USB charging dock is situated just beneath the strap joint and will be visible once you’ll undock the right strap from the main body. With this in-built USB port, you don’t need to carry a charger with you anymore, you’ll just have to put the port directly into any available charging adapter and its done. It’s the same design seen earlier on the Honor 5i band and really offers a hassle-free experience.
This is one thing am not convinced of. Realme should have used an AMOLED display instead of a TFT panel, which is absolutely dull. The brightness is on par and colors are neither punchy nor saturated. While indoor visibility is not impressive, daylight visibility is close to none. And if you’ll end up buying one, you’ll really have to struggle hard to read any text you get outdoors.
Realme band is operable by a single button and the panel is not touch. The button can be tapped to navigate through the simplistic UI, while it may sound a tough thing to do, it actually is very easy considering how simplistic Realme Band UI is. Tapping button will move you through apps, and to enter it, you’ll have to long press the button till you feel a slight vibration.
Realme Band comes with three modes yoga, run, and cricket. Cricket mode is an optimized mode designed for India which calculates the calorie usage while playing cricket. You can also add other modes or remove these modes but for that, you’ll have to download its android application – Realme Link App. Realme Band supports 6 modes – walk, Bike, Hiking, Fitness, Spinning, and Climbing.
Realme Link App available on android is a device connectivity app that is used to connect with Realme devices – Realme Buds Air and Realme Band for now. It offers a minimalistic user interface and is very easy to use.
To use it you’ll first have to create a Realme account then pair your device by Bluetooth. Once connected you’ll be able to manage your device and see fitness data directly in this App. You can see Heart monitoring, track your daily step goal, monitor the sleep-wake cycle and you will also be able to see the amount of remaining battery of your smart device in this app.
Some other features that you can control with this app are Watch face. There are three watch face to choose from and are not customizable. You can also set DND mode and control which apps can send you a notification. You can also set to run a heart sensor continuously or manually set it to work for certain hours. You can also manage alarms with this application.
Realme comes with 90 mAh battery. While Realme claims that Realme Band battery lasts up to 9 days, it's more or less true in our opinion. We charged this smart band on last Sunday and used it for an entire week with all features turned, and at the end of the week, we still had 4% battery left in it. So, it’s natural that it will last up to 9 days, provided you turn off continuous heart rate monitoring to manual mode.
Charging Realme band from 0 to 100% will take 50 minutes. 50 minutes for a week's usage? No complaints here. But, in any case, you are looking for superior battery life, you should spend a little more and go for Mi Band 4 or Honor Band 5 which claims to have a battery life of 20 days.
While Realme band isn’t a bad device at all, it’s definitely isn’t the best band out there. It’s the most affordable smart band yet. The build is good, its symmetric, minimalistic, premium and has got respectable battery life. But one issue that you seriously have to think about twice before considering this smart band is its brightness.
The daylight visibility is poor and if you are a person who spends his/her most of the time outdoors you should be looking for some other available options like Mi Band 4 or Honor 5. But if you’re the one with vampire traits, who stays most of the time indoors this device could prove to be a great choice.
Overall, at the end I’ll recommend you to spend some extra bucks and go for a better smart band with a better display. As for me, the only two things I look for while spending money on any smart band is its, display and battery.
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