(NEW) ALKAI Rugged Waterproof Smart Watch

I want to start off by reminding folks that this is a budget smart watch and the rating of this review is not comparing this to a $300 smart watch, of which I have not actually found one I would give five stars. At this price range, this is a great watch packed with a lot of great features. One of things I am very impressed with on this watch over the more expensive ones I own is the incredible battery life. I have it checking my heart rate throughout the day, yet after 8 days on a single charge it still has 25% battery left. Oh... and most importantly for a watch, it does accurately report the time of day. Some of the other things I like about this watch is the quality. It was lighter than I expected, yet still feels solid. The watch band was much better than I expected, made out of a solid cast aluminum. I typically do not like rubber watch bands but this one feels pretty good. The band does come with quick release connectors, so it is easy enough to swap it out with another 20mm if you want. The touch screen itself is very responsive and the user interface is much more snappy than it is on some of my more expensive watches. It comes with a number of pre loaded apps, including a calculator, 2048 game, flashlight, phone finder, remote shutter, stop watch, timer, and breathing exercises. All seem to work well. The sensors work great. I compared both the heart rate and blood oxygen readings with my dedicated SPO2 meter. They came out very close. You cannot set up continuous SPO2 monitoring, which would be great for sleep tracking for folks with sleep apnea, but once again, this is a budget watch. Along those lines, the sleep tracking seems to work well also, and provides some great feed back. Workout tracking is pretty good. You are not buying a GPS watch, so if you want to track routes or precise distances, you need to start the workout through the app and use the GPS on your phone. Step tracking through the day is right on par with my more expensive devices, coming within a couple of hundred steps over a 10k step day. There are a lot of great watch faces to choose from. I originally thought there was only about 10 but then realized the app has a huge library of others that you can load onto the watch. My one complaint is that there is not any kind of "Always on" so you need to tilt your wrist or tab a button to get the clock to display. While this does contribute to the amazing battery life, it would be nice to have the choice to have something light weight up all the time. Once again, this is a budget watch, so I am not going to hold that against them. The screen does show up quickly when it registers the wrist tilt. I do really enjoy this watch and it is my new daily wear compared to some of my more expensive watches.