Realme watch 2
The Realme Watch 2 is the follow-up to the Realme Watch, which came out in 2020 and was clearly a cheap smartwatch. The Watch 2 is still square, but it now looks more like a rectangle. It works with both Android and iOS devices. The size and resolution of the screen are the same, but it feels like a step up in quality all around.
Not a lot has changed about the way it works. As a smartwatch, you can see notifications, control the camera on your phone, play music, and check the weather. As a fitness tracker, you can measure how much oxygen is in your blood and keep track of how much sleep you get.
Making and showing
- 1.4-inch, 320 x 320 color touchscreen display
- 22mm interchangeable straps
- IP68 water resistance rating
The first Realme Watch was a small, light, square device. Realme hasn’t changed much here, but the way it fits on your wrist is a little different.
It has changed from a square plastic case to a rectangular one, but there is still a lot of space above and below the touchscreen display that is in the middle of the front. It has a 35mm case, which is technically smaller than the one on the original, and at 12.2mm thick, it’s also a bit chunkier. It also went from 31g to 38g in weight. But in the end, these are not the kinds of changes in size that you really notice. Even though it’s made of plastic, it’s still light and easy to wear.
This watch case now has a 22mm silicone strap that can be taken off with a simple pin on the back of each part of the strap. It looks like you can only get it with a black strap right now, and there hasn’t been much talk about the fashion straps that it promised with its predecessor. Still, the strap is comfortable and didn’t bother our skin or give us any reason to take it off. Only before getting in the shower or going swimming did we have to take it off. That’s because Realme has kept the same IP68 rating, which means that you can still only keep it on when you’re washing your hands.
There is still only one physical button on the right side of the case. Unlike its predecessor, this button does not have a red etching on it. This button is used to wake up the watch or turn it off or restart it.
You’ll have to use the touchscreen display, which, as we’ve already said, is fighting for space with the large bezel that’s already there. Realme says this is the same as the first Watch’s 1.4-inch, 320 x 320 color touchscreen display, but we think this is a much better screen. The colors look less washed out, it looks sharper and brighter, and you can see well both inside and outside. The screen’s responsiveness is also better, which was something we didn’t like about the first one. It’s not a screen that stays on all the time, so if you want to see your stats or the time, you’ll have to press a button.
In the end, it’s not by any stretch of the imagination a beautiful-looking connected timepiece. For the price, it’s a nice-looking watch that’s mostly made of plastic. It feels well-built, and the touchscreen is now better. It’s comfortable to wear all the time, even when working out and getting sweaty, and it does most of the important things well.
Software and how well it works
- iPhones and Android phones can use it.
- Look at messages
- Controls for playing music
Realme uses its own operating system for its smartwatches. The first Watch only worked with Android, but the Watch 2 can now work with iOS as well. It also works with iPhones that have iOS 6 or higher.
We spent most of our time testing it with a Realme Android phone, which was a good experience on the whole. Again, Realme hasn’t said much about the speed of the processor or the amount of memory on board, but it didn’t feel as slow as the first Watch. Taps and swipes worked better, and there was no noticeable lag. Even though things have gotten better, the transitions are still not as smooth as we’d like.
The watch is pretty much the same as before in terms of how to use it. Swipe down to see your stream of notifications. Swipe up to see the modes you can use. You can also swipe the screen to the left to see widgets for tracking your activities, your heart rate, and the weather. When you press down on the watch screen, you can change the watch face. The watch comes with a nice selection of watch faces, and you can add more from the Realme companion app.
When it comes to smartwatch features, being able to get notifications is the most important one here. Small app icons will help you figure out where the notification is coming from quickly, but you can’t do anything with them. Notifications from apps like Gmail show you the subject line, but you’ll need to look at your phone for more. It can show you the whole WhatsApp message, but it won’t show you any pictures that people drop into your chats.
The new look of the weather widget is nice to glance at, the music controls work well with apps like Spotify, and the camera control works once you turn it on in the Realme Link app. Realme smart home devices could be controlled from your wrist, but we didn’t have any of that connected gear to test it with.
To set up the watch and change its settings, you’ll need the Realme Link app for your phone. This is where you can check your fitness stats, get to the gallery of watch faces, and set up smartwatch features like notifications and call reminders. It’s a pretty simple app that lets you move around and turn settings on and off, which was great for us. Outside of Realme’s own app, you can sync workout data to Google Fit, but that’s all you can do right now with third-party apps.
Fitness tracking
Like most smartwatches these days, the Realme Watch 2 is a big deal for keeping track of your fitness and overall health, though not a lot has changed since the first Watch.
We’ll start with the sensors you can use. Again, you get a pretty standard three-axis accelerometer motion sensor and an optical heart rate monitor to keep an eye on your heart rate all the time and track it while you work out. There is also a blood oxygen sensor, but levels of blood oxygen can’t be constantly checked. It’s all about taking measurements on the spot.
Using the Watch 2 as an activity tracker, you can keep track of how many steps you take each day, how many calories you burn, how long you work out, and how active you are during the day. There are “inactivity alerts” that let you know if you haven’t moved around in a while. You can turn off these alerts by walking a certain number of steps. You can also do breathing exercises with the help of the watch. Again, an altimeter doesn’t make the cut, so you can’t keep track of how many floors you’ve gone up. Most days, it was accurate to within 500 steps of a Garmin watch, but on other days, it was as much as 1,000 steps off. You are also getting something that can automatically track how long you sleep and how your heart rate changes during sleep. Compared to Fitbit’s sleep tracking, it did record the same lengths of sleep, but it tended to record more deep sleep than Fitbit. The Fitbit also showed that my heart rate during sleep was much higher than I thought it was.
When it comes to heart rate, you can keep an eye on it all the time at intervals ranging from five minutes to thirty minutes. These shorter measurements will always affect the life of the battery. Most of the time, our resting heart rate, average heart rate, and highest heart rate were all much higher than what the heart rate monitors on our Garmin and Fitbit smartwatches and a chest strap monitor told us. At times, the readings for the heart rate at rest were 15-20bpm higher.
You also get a SpO2 sensor, which isn’t for medical purposes but lets you take measurements on the spot. These measurements take about a minute and are then sent to the Realme Link app. We compared it to an iHealth clinical-grade pulse oximeter, and overall, we were happy with how accurate it was.
On the first Realme Watch, there were 14 sports modes. The Watch 2 has up to 90 sports modes, such as cardio boxing, wrestling, rugby, and disc sports. These are basically just ways to label activities, and you can still only record the length of your workout and your heart rate.
Running and walking are still automatically recognized as exercises, but for the most accurate data, we recommend using the manual tracking option. It wasn’t very good at tracking heart rate while exercising either. Using a chest strap, the average heart rate during steady-paced workouts like indoor rowing was about 5bpm. When running at a steady pace outside, the average and maximum heart rates were off by 1 bpm compared to a chest strap. However, you can find the maximum heart rate data on the companion app’s daily heart rate screen instead of the exercise session. It worked better than we thought it would, but if you want to really put it to the test at a high level, you might be disappointed.
Battery life
- 315mAh power pack
- Up to 12 days on a single charge
Realme has made changes to the battery. It used to have a 160mAh battery, but now it has a 315mAh battery, which can last up to 12 days. The first Realme Watch said it would work for seven to nine days.
We thought the original Watch’s battery life claims were a little too good to be true, but we’re happy to say that even with a better screen, the Watch 2 has good battery life. We found that it went down about 10% per day, which is about 10 days. That was with all features turned on, like tracking some indoor and outdoor workouts and getting notifications.
When the connected GPS was put to the test for more than an hour, it only dropped by about 3 percent. So it seems to work well even when more power-hungry features are being used. The watch still has a power-saving mode that only shows the time and how much battery you have left. When it needs to be charged, you’ll need to put it on its charging base, which is shaped like a puck and has a magnetic clip on the back to keep it from moving while it’s charging.
Buy it if
You want a simple smartwatch that can track your fitness well.
Even though the Realme Watch 2 doesn’t have everything, it is a good watch for tracking your daily activity and sleep and handles notifications well.
You don’t want to have to pay a lot.
Its low price hasn’t changed, so if you can’t spend more than $100 or £100 on a connected watch, this is one to look at.
Don’t buy it if
Do you care about keeping track of sports?
Even though it has 90 sports modes, the core tracking isn’t great, and you can spend a little more for a more reliable experience.
You want a smartwatch that looks good.
Even though the Watch 2 is well made, it looks very plain and is made of plastic.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Nice Screen | Not good for Sport mode |
| Fitness tracking | Bit of a darb look |
| Watch face option | Software features are mostly the same as the first Watch. |
| Product | Expected Price |
| Realme Watch 2 | Rs 7,300 |
