Vastking recently launched their new smartwatch, the Fit M3 with an all metal and thin body, long battery life and IP68 certified waterproof. Let’s take a look to see if it stands out in a crowded budget smartwatch market?
Design
The Fit M3 is available in two colours, black or pink. The design is minimalist and shaped like the Apple watch. On the right is a multi functional button with a red accent. It’s a comfortable wide button with decent feedback when pressed.
The Fit M3 measures in at a diameter of 44mm and a thickness of 8.5mm. It weighs just 40 grams making it ideal to wear all day and night for sleep tracking.
The detachable 20mm silicone straps are comfortable and durable even when your wrist gets dirty or sweaty. The long straps and dual loops allow you to find the perfect position whether you have large or small wrists.
The Fit M3 is IP68 certified allowing you to shower or wear it while swimming. The good news is the watch will track your swimming to get performance data.
Around the back, we have two pogo charging pins, optical heart rate sensor and SPO2 sensor. These are elevated to ensure the sensors make good contact with the skin for accurate measurements.
Display
The Fit M3 has a large 1.65 inch IPS display that is more generous than some of the competition. The resolution is 240 x 295 HD with adjustable 5 levels of screen brightness.
The screen on the Fit M3 is sharp and vivid with excellent viewing angles both indoors and outdoors. Even at the lowest brightness setting, the display was easily readable outdoors in the sun.
Tapping and swiping on the touchscreen was very responsive with simple navigation of the menu options on the watch.
The Fit M3 has 4 main watch faces to select from the watch itself with a further 100 odd watch faces to download on the Da Fit app.
Connectivity
The M3 connects to your smartphone Da Fit app via Bluetooth 5. Unfortunately at this budget price point, you cannot pay with this watch via a mobile payment system or make calls.
Software
The watch operating system on the Fit M3 is simple and easy to navigate. With a swipe of your finger, all the main menu screens appear. For example, swiping down brings up the setting features. Swiping left to right brings up icon menus like the 8 sports modes, numbers of steps, heart rate monitor, blood oxygen level monitor and so on.
There’s also options to check the weather forecast, control the music player on your smartphone and camera shutter from the watch.
Da Fit App
The Da Fit app is straightforward to install from the Apple store or Google play store. Link the watch to your smartphone via Bluetooth to synchronise your watch data to the app.
At a glance the app provides the usual stats like number of steps, sleep monitoring, heart rate, blood oxygen, and outdoor running.
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.
You can set up notifications on the Da Fit app when your phone rings or texts you. There’s a good choice of communication apps like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, WeChat and Instagram.
Sports Modes
The Fit M3 has 8 sport modes to monitor including the main ones like running, walking, cycling and swimming thanks to the IP68 rating. Plus unusual ones like skipping, basketball and badminton.
If you wish to track your walking or running progress on a map, you need to take your smartphone on your run as there is no GPS chip built-in.
Health and Fitness
The Fit M3 wouldn’t be a smart watch if it didn’t have the ubiquitous heart rate and blood oxygen (SpO2) monitoring.
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 M3 built-in SpO2 sensor calculates your blood oxygen saturation to give indications of your health and wellbeing.
You can set up interval reminders to drink water, move around and physiological cycles.
The Fit M3 is IP68 certified to withstand dust, dirt and sand. Plus it’s safe in the rain, swimming pool and cold showers.
Battery Life
The 200mAh battery is good enough for several weeks with light use and always on display turned off. If you turn on the display and 24/7 heart rate monitoring, expect around a weeks’ battery life.
Charging with the USB magnetic connector takes approx. two hours.
Summary
The Vastking Fit M3 is a great budget smartwatch for just under £33 or $45. It ticks all the main features that you would expect. The M3 is comfortable to wear day and night thanks to the silicone straps and lightweight metal body.
The large IPS display is a joy to view, both sharp and bright whatever the lighting condition around it. The touchscreen is responsive and intuitive alongside the big button on the side for additional navigation of the menu options.
The usual monitoring is present on the Fit M3, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, sleep tracking and of course number of daily steps. Battery life is excellent between charges primarily due to the lack of GPS. If you want to leave your smartphone behind for a run, the Fit M3 won’t give you these route stats on a map.
The Da Fit app has a fairly refined UI and provides all the necessary stats at a glance. Connectivity is reliable over Bluetooth and it syncs up with Google Fit. However, if you use Strava, look elsewhere.
So is the Vastking Fit M3 worth your money? Most definitely for the price. For a feature rich first time budget smartwatch, the Fit M3 hits the mark.
More information on the Vastking Fit M3 can be found here: https://www.vastking.com/products/fit-m3#
We have a $20.00 off promo code for it: FITM3.
What do you guys think? Leave your comments and discuss below.