Intro
UMIDIGI products have always given plenty of features at an aggressive price point. The new UMIDIGI Urun smartwatch caught my eye with an integrated GPS module and blood Oxygen monitoring on a budget priced watch. Is it worth £47 or dollars of your money? Let’s find out.
Design
The Urun comes in a choice of 5 colours including the standard space grey in this review. The 1.1 inch display is surrounded by a round watch face with two physical buttons on the right side.
The Urun aircraft grade aluminum body measures a diameter of 44mm and a thickness of 12.9mm. It’s a nice, balanced size for small to large wrists. Around the rear, there are magnetic contacts for charging and a heart rate sensor.
The plastic strap is made of silicone, making it durable and perfect for sporty use. In the month and a half of testing it, the watch is comfortable to wear 24/7 including sleeping with it and running.
The strap itself is easy to put on with one hand thanks to the lightweight 29 grams. My only small bugbear is the loop kept coming off on my small wrist.The good news is the 22mm straps are easily removable and can be swapped out for new ones.
Display
The round colour TFT LCD touch display with a screen size of 1.1 inches is bright and clear whether you are using it indoors or outside running with it. The touchscreen has a 2.5D tempered glass with an anti fingerprint coating. The bezel is quite thick compared to the display dimensions.
There’s three brightness levels that you can set on the watch itself. To conserve battery life you can set how long the display stays on when you turn it on, from 5 seconds to 30 seconds.
UMIDIGI gives you a choice of four watch faces depending on your mood. Unfortunately there’s no option to download anymore faces through the app or via third party makers.
Connectivity
Wireless connectivity is via Bluetooth 5 to connect to the Paiactive app. At this price point there is no Mobile payment system like Google Pay or 4G LTE via a SIM slot.
Software
The watch OS v1.03 runs smoothly when swiping around the choices available to you. Most of the navigation is done with your finger but there are two physical buttons on the side, the top button is a shortcut to the 17 sports modes and health features. The lower button is a shortcut to the settings options.
You can set up vibration notifications on the Paiactive app when you phone rings or texts you. Also there is a list of communication apps like WeChat, Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp and Twitter.
There’s also options to check weather forecast, control music player and camera shutter from the watch.
Paiactive App
The Paiactive app is fairly straightforward to install for your Android or iOS device. Once you bind it to the watch via Bluetooth, it synchronizes your watch data to the app and allows you to set certain options on the Urun watch.
Stats wise, the app provides the usual fitness features like number of steps, calories burnt, heart rate, sleep monitoring, blood oxygen, blood pressure and fitness data.
Naturally you can drill down each of those categories to see more stats for the week, month or year. Everything is app driven so there’s no web version to view this data but you can upload your run or walk to Google Fit or Strava.
Sports & GPS
The Urun has 18 sport modes to monitor including the main ones like running, walking cycling and more recently indoor swimming that was added with a January update.
The Urun supports 3 different positioning systems in GPS, GLONASS and BeiDou. Locking into two of the satellite systems and combining them to give an accurate GPS tracking accuracy.
In reality the GPS locked into the satellite positioning really well, about 11 seconds to lock onto the GPS outdoors here in the UK. Plus the added bonus of leaving your phone behind when you want to go for a run or long cycle.
The GPS accuracy was excellent throughout testing especially coming from a budget smartphone. Naturally the results can be uploaded onto the Paiactive app and you can eagle eye over the stats.
Health and Fitness
The main star of the show on the fitness side is the blood oxygen (SpO2) monitoring of the level of blood oxygen saturation. An indicative figure of less than 95 percent is considered low and could lead to health conditions. A secondary benefit of SpO2 monitoring is in this COVID world we live in, it could give early warning of potential covid breathing difficulties. Unfortunately Sp02 monitoring is manually activated and not in real time.
However the good news is heart rate monitoring is in real time, 24/7. Like any smartwatch stats, you have to take the figures with a little pinch of salt in terms of accuracy.
The Urun reminders allow you to set intervals to take you medication, drink water, sleep and get up to do some exercise.
The Urun is 5 ATM waterproof or 50 metres while swimming or snorkeling. No more worrying when the heavens open while you are out jogging. Just don’t expect to go scuba diving with it.
Battery Life
Battery life is around 6 days with general use, expect that to decrease if you intend to use the GPS for walking or running activities.
Charging with the USB magnetic connector takes approx. 2.5hrs.
Summary
The UMIDIGI Urun for £47 or $47 is a bargain of a fitness/sports smartwatch. One of the first at this aggressive price point to provide full GPS tracker and Blood Oxygen monitoring alongside an abundance of other useful features that we could take all day to talk about.
The watch is comfortable to wear 24/7 even when you go to bed, thanks to the replaceable silicone straps and light weight. The display, OK could be larger in diameter, is clear and easy to read both indoors and outside. The two physical buttons are useful but not intuitive to navigate with. For example I expected the second button to go back on a menu option but it doesn’t. Battery life is almost a week with general usage which is practical without being a slave to a charging point. Don’t expect fast charging at this price point, one to leave overnight to charge.
If you do the odd run or two, it’s great to know it actually syncs up with Google Fit and Strava, unheard of in a budget smartwatch of this price.
The biggest weakness is the Paiactive app. It frequently disconnects from the watch. Leaving you to pray that the Bluetooth reconnects to the Urun with a restart of your phone. This also means the reminders on your watch sometimes will work and other times stop working due to the Bluetooth disconnections.
The navigation on the app could be more user friendly, especially when you are used to the big players like Fitbit or Garmin. For example, there’s no where to change from metric to imperial units or vice versa on the app and watch.
If you can live with the app and disconnections, the UMIDIGI Urun is a steal for someone who’s after a fully featured smartphone with GPS tracking and Blood Oxygen monitoring at a price that won’t break the bank.