Lenovo has today launched its digital smartwatch in India, priced at just Rs. 1,999. At that price, getting a smartwatch from a well-known brand such as Lenovo sounds like a pretty sweet deal, doesn’t it? So, is it actually a sweet deal, and should you consider buying the Lenovo EGO for your needs? Well, I’ve been using the Lenovo EGO for almost a week now, and here are my thoughts on the watch, what it can do, what it can’t do, and whether or not it’s worth buying.
At first glance, the Lenovo EGO gives off the distinct impression of being a regular digital watch, and might even trick you into thinking it’s a Casio G-Shock. That’s not a bad thing, per-se, after all, smartwatches that look like regular watches to the point of being deceptive aren’t a bad thing — they can blend right in. However, take a couple of seconds to look at this watch, and you’ll easily be able to tell that it’s meant to be a very-low priced smartwatch.
The build, on the other hand, is clearly where the company cut considerable costs. Don’t get me wrong, the EGO is by no means a fragile watch. I’ve used it carelessly, tossed it in my bag for formal outings when I preferred wearing my regular watch instead, and just treated it like a rugged watch for the most part, and it has held up surprisingly well. However, the quality of the plastic on the casing, and the rubber straps is very obviously not that great. It looks decidedly cheap to the eyes, and it feels thin and weird when you touch it. Even comparing it to the Mi Band’s silicone strap, the EGO’s strap is not at the same level.
The display on the EGO is definitely not what you’d expect from a smartwatch, or even most fitness trackers. This is a typical display you’d find on a digital watch, and that might be a good thing or a bad one depending on what you’re actually looking for in a watch. Personally, I think the OLED display on the Mi Band 3 is a better deal than this one — it can show a lot more information, and that’s something where the Lenovo EGO falls back substantially as we’ll discuss in the features section of this review.
Other than that though, the display does its job just fine. It doesn’t show a lot of information, which might be good for you if you don’t like smartwatches that bombard you with information, but the information it does show, is well organised and is just enough to justify wearing this watch regularly. There’s also a ‘Light’ button here, since the display itself isn’t backlit like what you’d see on the Mi Band 3, and that button is something you’ll not realise the importance of until you find yourself driving at night, and trying to check the time on your watch (or in another, similar situation).
Oh, the buttons. I have a lot of mixed feelings about these buttons. These buttons feel tactile enough to not make you wonder whether you pressed them or not, which is a great thing, but Lenovo did this thing where it labelled these buttons with things like ‘Light’, ‘Start’, ‘Mode’, and ‘Reset’ and this naming scheme will throw you off unless you read the manual and figure out what each of these buttons is actually meant to do.
Step Tracking
If there is one good thing I can say about the EGO, it’s that it does come with most of the features you are likely to be expecting from it. There’s a step counter, and it’s decently accurate, although it does count around 10-15% less steps than I was taking, based on my own counting of the steps. Still, it’s not that big an issue.
There’s also a heart-rate sensor which, by default, takes a continuous heart rate measurement. Well, I say continuous, but the Lenovo Life app which the watch connects to and syncs with, simply calls it ‘Automatic Measurement’ and says that the watch takes measurements “every once in a while”. The heart rate sensor feels pretty accurate too, and for the most part, readings from the watch and from my Galaxy S10’s built-in step tracker were close enough.
The watch also has sleep tracking capabilities, and while it does track sleep pretty accurately, I didn’t really like the feeling of sleeping with a bulky watch strapped to my wrist every night, and I’m not sure if a lot of people will, either. That said, if you do sleep with the watch on your wrist, the sleep tracking is pretty good, and I don’t really have complaints with it. Also, the watch apparently can track swims as well — that’s something I didn’t test out though.
Another feature that I thought would be cool, but actually wasn’t, is the remote camera feature. This isn’t an entirely new concept, I could do this with a third party app on my first generation Moto 360 back in the day, but the Lenovo EGO comes with a remote camera feature built in. However, using it can be a pain.
The Lenovo EGO doesn’t have a built-in speaker, but that doesn’t hold it back from becoming a pretty solid alarm clock. If you set an alarm using the Lenovo Life app, the watch uses vibrations to wake you up, and yes, it sounded pretty silly to me too, but it’s pretty effective at waking me up. I mean, sure, on the first day I ended up setting my regular alarms on my phone as well, but I decided to risk it on a weekend when oversleeping wouldn’t be an issue, but the watch could easily wake me up, which is great. Setting the alarm isn’t the most easy task to accomplish, since you’ll have to depend on the Lenovo Life app for it, but hey, at least it works and it works well.
The EGO wouldn’t qualify as a smartwatch unless it had the capability to notify you of, well, notifications on your phone, and this watch does that, just not as well or as effectively as you’d expect from something like the Mi Band.
Basically, you can enable notification support from the app, and choose the apps you want to receive notifications from. The feature works reliably, and the vibration is strong enough to alert you easily. However, when you receive a notification for something like a message, the watch simply says ‘Message’ on the display, and doesn’t show who the message is from, or what the message says — that’s something the Mi Band 3 can do, and it does it pretty well.
One of the things that really impressed me about this smartwatch is the battery. Now, Lenovo hasn’t mentioned the battery specifications of the watch, but it does claim a 20-day battery life on it, which is pretty neat on paper.
Charging takes place via pogo-connectors on the back of the watch which magnetically align with the charging module that you get in the box, and it takes around an hour to fully charge the EGO, after which it’s good to go for another 10 to 15 days.
It’s a pretty difficult thing to recommend or not recommend this watch. After all, Lenovo is offering a very watch-like smartwatch at just Rs. 1,999 and it does a lot of things really well. It’s decently accurate at measuring steps, measuring your heart rate, waking you up in the morning, and telling you the time (duh!). Plus it has a nice battery life. However, it’s also annoying how the buttons are labelled, the notification support isn’t robust enough and is easily beat by the Mi Band 3 (Rs. 1,999), and on a personal note, I don’t find the design to be very attractive.
