Can you buy a premium quality budget smartwatch for $40? – Tozo S7

For a while now I’ve been looking to replace my old FitBit band with something newer. Looking around online I’ve seen a lot of digital watches ranging in price from under £50 up to the premium Apple style devices at quite a few hundred pounds. Always on the look out for a great bargain I was interested in seeing if these budget priced models would really work as a watch / fitness band.

Luckily Tozo offered to send out one of their new S7 smartwatches for me to have a play with. This is a fully featured device with a full colour LCD screen for only $40. So let’s see what it can do.

Get a Tozo S7 on Amazon @ https://amzn.to/3X1Cbev

Tozo Store @ https://amzn.to/4hXAFSR

Unboxing

The watch comes nicely packaged with a useful and understandable user manual, a bespoke USB charging lead, an interchangeable watch strap and the smartwatch itself.

The strap simply clips onto the watch body with some secure, but easy to release clips so that you can change the straps whenever you want to alter the look of the watch.

To get the watch up and running you need to install the Tozo health app onto your phone. This is available for both Android and iOS devices so you won’t have any compatibility issues.

Once the app is installed you simply need to go in to the devices section and pair the phone to the watch. This will allow the two devices to talk and synchronise their data and we’re all ready to go.

Specifications

So let’s first look at the specifications for this device.

The watch sports a 1.85 inch high definition LCD panel. It’s almost a square aspect ratio, just a bit taller than it is wide. The screen is a proper AMOLED display so you get really bright and vibrant colours that you can easily read in any lighting conditions both inside and outdoors. The resolution is 390 x 450 pixels which at this small sized screen gives very smooth and clear images.

The screen is touch enabled so you can click, swipe, etc and it also has a push and twist control button on the side to help you scroll and select items.

Overall the user interface of the device is incredibly good.

There are a wide range of watch faces to choose from ranging from analogue watch displays, through fitness bands and on to some more unusually themed options. All are very clear and bright and give you access to the most important information right from the home screen. Initially the watch only has a couple of screens loaded but you can install more from the Tozo health app as free downloads.

The watch has wrist motion detection to turn on the screen by just flicking your wrist or you can click the side button. A second click will take you into the app menu. Here you can either use the touch screen swipe gesture or use the rotation of the side push button to navigate the menu. Simply touching an app will open it up but molre on these functions in a bit.

The watch is sold as a sports watch and is therefore rated at IP68. This means that it is fully protected from dust and dirt getting into the device and is water resistant in fresh water for up to 30 minutes at 1.5m depth. This means that you can wear it in the pouring rain, in the shower, or even go swimming with it. Just don’t dive too deep or the water pressure will get through the seals.

Sensor wise the watch can read your heart rate, blood oxygen levels, steps and activity levels, breathing rates and sleep patterns. Pretty much everything you’d expect from a fully featured fitness band.

Accuracy is really good. I tested the S7 against my medically rated finger clip on monitor and the values all matched up really well. So you can be sure that the information the watch is gathering about you is correct.

Connectivity to your phone is great. The device has full call features built into it with a good quality speaker so you can actually make and receive calls directly from the watch. Sound quality is good in both directions so you don’t need to get your phone out in the middle of your exercise.

One thing the watch is lacking is inbuilt GPS. To get this information the watch relies on your phone so you’ll need that with you and connected to your watch to get route and distance information. Your phone doesn’t need to be fully turned on, but you do need the Tozo app running in the background so the watch can sync with the GPS data. The system works really well and will accurately track your journey but it does mean taking your phone with you, which probably isn’t an issue anyway.

The other really good feature of the S7 is battery life. I’ve been using mine for a week now from its initial full charge. That’s included a couple of long walks, gym sessions where I use the watch as a stopwatch and general usage. Surprisingly the S7 still has about 30% charge left so the company’s claims of 10 days usage do seem accurate, giving the S7 a really long gap between charges.

The Tozo Health App

So, the S7 watch itself is hard to fault. But what about its companion app?

The Tozo Health app does everything you want it to. It will give you all the statistics you would want from your sports tracker. Heart rate and activity tracking, sleep analysis, stress analysis and so on. As you use the watch it will build up its knowledge about you and compile trend statistics and start to advise you on various aspects. Comparing it to my FitBit app I don’t really see anything one does better than the other, so again a good job by the Tozo team to get their budget level device matching the bigger names.

Having said that there is one aspect that I did find lacking in the app and that’s connections with other apps and devices. The Tozo app will only allow you to share data with the Strava app. Whilst this is great if you use that app it won’t let you share or pull data in from other apps. Unfortunately things like your smart scales, or nutrition trackers won’t be able to communicate with the Tozo App.

Having said that this limitation is purely a software limitiation. Perhaps Tozo will address this in future updates.

Conclusion

Overall then this is actually a really good watch regardless of the budget price. I genuinely find it hard to see how they can fit so much technology into the device and still sell if for $40.

Compared to my old FitBit. Well that’s now sitting in the drawer gathering dust. This watch will do everything I need. Yes, there are a couple of niggles such as having to manually enter some weight and other data into the app, but these are really minor.

Looking at other premium devices I’m not really sure what they would offer on top of this S7 device. I’m sure there are various features but I don’t think they would be enough to make me fork out the extra few hundred pounds to get them.