The Amazon Prime Day Sales are almost upon us, and although the sales period isn’t due to officially begin until Tuesday, July 16, some of the earliest Amazon Prime Day smartwatch deals are already live right now.
Historically, Amazon Prime Day has been an opportunity to get best apple watches, best garmin watchesbest running watches or even best golf watches at a significant discount, saving potentially hundreds of dollars or pounds. Cheap fitness trackers are also in the mix, so you can choose a group like this one Huawei Band 7 or Fitbit Inspire 3 for a song.
However, the cheapest deals are always reserved for watches with names on Amazon like (and this is verbatim) “Smart Watch Men Women Answer/Make Call, 1.85″ Smart Watch, Fitness Tracker Watch with Heart Rate Monitor, Blood Pressure, Sleep Monitor, 140+ Sports, IP68 Waterproof Watch with Step Counter, Compatible with Android IOS.” Catchy.
The reason this smartwatch is named so is because it shows up in more searches around those keywords, so a buyer searching for “heart rate fitness tracker” will find it higher in the results list. I’m seeing an increased amount of these very cheap watches this year, even in the “suggested” listings when I search for keywords like “Apple Watch” or “Garmin Watch.”
These multi-keyword lists work, and Amazon doesn’t seem to penalize stores for playing the system, so they should be bought. I suppose it makes sense: after all, the similarly priced $20 / £15 /AU$26 Casio F-91W is the best-selling watch in the world.
The big difference here is that the Casio F-91W is extremely reliable as well as ultra cheap. I won’t wax lyrical about it (you can read my love letter to it The Casio watch is the best $15 I’ve ever spent here), but I can tell you that these cheap smartwatches are not as reliable as the humble plastic Casio.
The Answer/Make Call smartwatch for men and women is actually made by a company called AcclaFit, and I had the dubious pleasure of i tested one last year as part of a “$20 Challenge” article. I was initially impressed with the number of features on offer, but concluded that the lack of precision in most features made it almost unusable for anything other than a rough guess.
I also tested a cheap fitness tracker, the Viido tracker, in a similar price range to a top Garmin watch and concluded that it was unusable. What’s more, it was potentially dangerous, supplying people looking for accurate fitness metrics with false information.
Even if it doesn’t display your data correctly, it’s still sending your health data, perhaps the most valuable data set you can ever give, to a server somewhere for undisclosed purposes. Most smartwatches from big brands have privacy policies that dictate how your data is treated: Apple published a white paper on how it handles users’ health data, and even Google is subject to GDPR and other data protection laws.
I hit a dead end when I tried to follow the data privacy policies of AcclaFit and Viido. Viido’s website was actually, amusingly, flagged by my computer’s anti-virus software, so I decided not to look there any further. AcclaFit has no online presence other than a Facebook group with about 20 followers. I went a little further by finding its apparent parent company, Shenzhen Wanchuangxing Technology Co., Ltd., and its Alibaba page, but I couldn’t find any information about its use of user data. It actually sells industrial manufacturing equipment as well as consumer-oriented health tracking devices.
So if they’re borderline useless as wearables and potentially harmful when it comes to using your data, the bottom line is: don’t fall for it, even if they look like Apple Watches or Fitbits. Tell your less tech-savvy friends and family not to buy them if they’re thinking of doing so — even as gifts. Instead, check out the great deals on more useful devices and buy a tracker that’s really good by spending a little more money.
