Philip’s Health Watch – DO NOT BUY

First let me tell you, I have been waiting for a fitness band to not have notifications and all that extra bloat. If I want to check my phone, I will check my phone. If I want to check the time or my heartbeat, my wrist. I just don’t want my wrist vibrating to make me more neurotic than I already am with my updates and notifications. So let’s just jump into the thick of it.

That aside, this is the first watch that LOOKED nice to me. It has a beautiful simple design to it. Looks great on the wrist, however the watch itself is a bit “thick” and the band, while strong would be the first thing I replace for a nylon cloth type strap, this thing just makes me sweat. But it is what it is. Personal preference here.

There is a slight latency when swiping left and right for quick views. It drives me a little batty. Hopefully they fix this in a firmware update. I agree that the digital watch face has a strange look, especially for the analogue look. Something is wrong with the edges of the second and minute hand. They have distortion.I think it has to do with the display itself though. But if they could fix it otherwise it would be cool. It reminds me of those old tomagachis. But come on, 250$ for that kinda display is a bit off putting.

The 21 mm watch band may not seem like a big deal however, I dare you to find one you like online. This is such a weird size it is almost impossible to have many options which limits you a lot. 20 and 22 is the norm.

The other thing that is weird is the “auto lock” screen feature with no way to turn it off. I don’t wanna double tap my screen every time I wanna swipe the watch. Give us that option.

It is supposed to track sleep automatically. It fails to do this at times.

Now for the good, it is extremely accurate with heart rate and figuring out you are sleeping. It is lightweight, and the app has great graphs, check out the graph from when I was playing a video game and you can see when I engaged in some intense fighting activity haha.

That will be a great feature to see if you have anxiety levels or other such things so you can see when your heart spiked. Which is important to understanding triggers.

Look overall, I wanted a watch without the “smart notifications and such” bells and whistles. But 250$ and you are lacking many key features like water proofing, a screen that looks like it is from this century, a laggy interface, and a really long sync process. I dunno what to say really. I am going to hang out with it for a few more days. But I just can’t figure out if this is the watch for me yet. The 9 minutes of activity before reading “active” is just dumb. I get the idea, but it should track those 9 minutes as well consdiering a lot of us do HIIT (high intensity interval training). Hope they fix this.

Other than the fact that it looks nice and has accurate readings, it has a lot of things to catch up to being worth 250$, a premium!

UPDATE: sleep tracking is not automatic for advanced stats you have to turn it on and set an alarm or turn it off. Also I put it through an intense workout today cardio plyo hiit you name it. It barely kept my BPM on the monitor often showing two dashes. It would jump 10 points up and down within seconds inaccurately and had to be tightened to an uncomfortable level to even get half a reading. When bringing it into the app it seems like it actually did keep track of the heart rate but the watch itself couldn’t keep up with the display this is a huge problem. And then the discrepancies between app screens. As you can see in the 4 hour shot I did a hard workout. In the overall it says 1000+ calories but only 30 steps and on the main screen it says 30 cals. Uhm what?! I think this watch is not ready for prime time yet until they fix major issues like this. Specially since it is a premium price for “accurate stats” ONLY.

UPDATE:

The Philips Health Watch was pulled from Amazon after a flurry of negative reviews in which they had to start getting fake reviews up to play damage control it was under 3 stars before the padding reviews began and it was pulled. We are unclear if Amazon pulled it for breaking the ToS or Philips for having a broken product.

We do know they wouldn’t accept our review on their website however:

Man haven’t felt that let down since a middle school dance.

I would seriously hold out from making any purchase of this product until they get their act together.