Wyze Watch – Review 2021

Wyze makes some of most affordable smart home devices on the market, like light bulbs and home security cameras. If you have a bunch of Wyze gadgets, you’re the prime customer for the $20 Wyze Watch, which lets you set up shortcuts to control them from your wrist with a few taps. This inexpensive Apple Watch lookalike also boasts a pulse oximeter to read your blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) level, and can help you keep tabs on your calorie burn, heart rate, sleep, steps, and the date of your next period. Aside from the SpO2 sensor, however, we found its health and fitness tracking capabilities to be lackluster in testing. And apart from its smart home controls, this is about as basic as a smartwatch get.

Which Wyze Watch Is Which?

Wyze plans to offer the watch in two sizes: 44mm and 47mm. The 44mm model features a 1.73-inch case that’s better sized for small wrists, while the 47mm version has a larger 1.85-inch case. 

At the time of this writing, the 44mm model is temporarily unavailable. A Wyze spokesperson says the company is currently building a page on its site specifically for that version, which is a different watch with different features aside from just size. The company plans to refer to them separately to highlight the variations in each model.

Beyond its smaller size, the 44mm model has a smaller battery (250mAh vs. 300mAh), a slightly different interface, and different clock face options (though both give you the option of adding a photo of your choice to the background). This review focuses on the 47mm Wyze Watch. 

Adding to the confusion, the company also sells the $25 Wyze Band, which looks more like a traditional fitness tracker, but doesn’t feature a blood oxygen sensor. The Wyze Watch has a larger screen that’s better for viewing notifications, and offers what some might consider a more stylish look overall. Beyond that, the main difference is that the Band has Amazon Alexa built in, while the watch doesn’t have a microphone, and thus doesn’t support voice assistants. 

Wyze Watch Design and Features

With its rectangular watch face and rounded corners, the Wyze Watch can easily be mistaken for an Apple Watch at a glance, though it lacks the distinctive Digital Crown on the side.

It features a 1.75-inch TFT color touch screen with 385-by-320-pixel resolution, and a gray aluminum alloy frame with one physical button on the right side. The screen is bright and colorful, but sometimes feels a bit laggy, especially when scrolling vertically. In comparison, the Wyze Band features a smaller 0.95-inch AMOLED color touch screen with a resolution of 240 by 120 pixels. 

It comes with a simple black silicone band with a metal buckle, and is compatible with standard 22mm quick release watch straps (sold separately). It weighs 1.6 ounces and feels light and comfortable on my wrist. 

The watch has an IP68 rating, meaning it can withstand dust, dirt, sand, and is water resistant to a maximum depth of 6.5 feet for up to 30 minutes. The Wyze Band, in comparison, has a 5ATM water-resistance rating, meaning it can be submerged in up to 164 feet of water for up to 10 minutes. 

Wyze says the watch’s 300mAh battery will last up to nine days on a charge. After wearing it for 24 hours, during which I extensively tested its features, the watch still had 81% battery life remaining. That’s a solid result, but it falls a bit short of the Wyze Band, which only drained 7% in 24 hours and promises up to 10 days of battery life. 

The Wyze Watch offers the following apps: Fitness Tracking (for recording runs), Data (which shows your calories burned and steps), Blood Oxygen, Heart Rate, Sleep, Menstrual Cycle Tracker, Alarms, Timers, Shortcuts (for controlling Wyze smart home devices, sold separately), Weather, and Settings. It doesn’t support downloadable apps, so that’s all you get.

It connects to your phone via Bluetooth, and uses your phone’s internet connection (either Wi-Fi or cellular). Without your phone nearby, the watch will only be able to track your blood oxygen level, heart rate, steps, and function as an alarm clock and/or timer. All of its other features require a phone connection. 

Lots of Limitations

At the risk of stating the obvious, you shouldn’t expect every feature you get in a $400 Apple Watch Series 6 from the $20 Wyze Watch. Before I go into detail about the features it does offer, let’s go over what you don’t get here. 

For starters, the Wyze Watch doesn’t have an always-on display, so after a few seconds of inactivity, the screen goes black. In Settings, you can enable Raise to Wake, which will light up the screen when you lift your arm. You can set a start and end time for this feature, so it will only illuminate the screen during certain hours, like from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., so as not to wake you at night.  

As mentioned, the Wyze Watch doesn’t have a speaker or microphone, and therefore doesn’t work with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or any other voice assistants. That’s one of the main reasons the Wyze Band costs a few bucks more: It features a dual microphone array and has Alexa built in, letting you control non-Wyze devices with your voice. On a related note, the Wyze Watch also doesn’t support IFTTT, a service that lets you connect apps and devices to set up automations. As far as smart home controls go, it only works with Wyze devices. 

The watch doesn’t offer storage for music, and won’t let you control tunes playing on your phone. A lack of NFC means it doesn’t support mobile payments. It works with the included magnetic charger, but it doesn’t support wireless charging. 

On the communication front, the Wyze Watch will alert you to incoming phone calls, and you’ll be able to accept or deny them from your wrist, which can be useful when you’re wearing headphones. But since it doesn’t have a microphone or speaker, you can’t have a conversation through the watch. And while it can show incoming texts, you can’t use it to send outgoing messages. 

The watch features acceleration, blood oxygen, and heart rate sensors, but it doesn’t have GPS, and its fitness app only offers one activity profile: running. Wyze says the watch won’t interfere with pacemakers or any other internal medical devices. 

It offers a continuous heart rate monitoring feature, which when enabled will take a reading every five minutes. Wyze says this feature provides more accurate readings but will drain the battery faster. To enable it, navigate to Settings > Heart Rate on the watch. It also lets you measure your heart rate on demand, but it can’t perform an electrocardiogram (ECG), so it can’t detect heart arrhythmia. 

Simple to Set Up

Setting up the Wyze Watch is easy. To get started, simply plug the included charging cord into a standard USB port, then attach the watch to the other end. My test unit arrived almost fully charged, so I was able to set it up right away. When you see a QR code on screen, the watch is ready for setup. 

If you don’t already have the Wyze app (available for Android and iOS), you’ll need to download it and create an account. Then, just tap the plus sign in the upper left corner, select Add Device > Lifestyle > Wyze Watch 47, tap Okay to allow camera access, and use your phone to scan the QR code on the watch screen to pair it. 

Next, the app asks which wrist you wear your watch on (a standard question when setting up most wearables), then goes over how to navigate it. The Wyze Watch interface is colorful and easy to navigate. Swipe left on the screen to access apps, and swipe right to view your calorie and step data. Swipe up to access quick settings (battery life, brightness, do not disturb mode, and find my phone), and swipe down to see your smartphone notifications. To go back when you’re not on the clock face, swipe right.  

To restart or power off the watch, press and hold the side button. To change the clock face, press and hold the screen. In the app, you can browse more clock face designs and sync them with the watch (you can have up to three at a time). Like the Wyze Band, the watch offers some clock face customization options, including the ability to upload a photo from your phone and use that as your background. 

In the Notification section of the app, you can enable/disable call, text, and app notifications. It also lets you individually toggle notifications on/off for the following apps: Wyze, Facebook, WeChat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Gmail, Apple Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Uber, Lyft, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Strava, MyFitnessPal, Runkeeper, and “other applications.” I enabled all notifications, and they appeared on the Wyze Watch without issue, and its large screen provides ample reading room. Notifications from apps not listed above (including Slack and Furbo) came through as Others.

Shortcuts for Smart Home Control 

If you own other Wyze devices, you can add up to 10 shortcuts to the watch for quick smart home controls. To do so, just visit the Shortcuts section of the app. Any shortcuts you have previously set up in the Wyze app will be listed here, and you can add them with a single tap. 

The app also makes it easy to set up new shortcuts. Just tap Create a New Shortcut, give it a name, press the plus sign, select one of your Wyze devices (or a group of them), then choose what you want it to do. 

I have a bunch of color Wyze bulbs throughout my house, and in just a few minutes, I was able to create several different shortcuts that let me control individual lights, as well as groups of lights I had previously linked together. For instance, I created a shortcut called Night Light On that turns on the Wyze bulbs in both of my bedside table lamps, sets their brightness to 1%, and sets their color temperature to soft white. 

All of my shortcuts quickly synced to the watch and worked as expected. My only complaint is that Wyze limits you to 10, which isn’t all that many if you own a lot of the company’s smart home devices.  

Blood Oxygen Saturation Readings 

The Wyze Watch features an LED cluster on the back that shines light into your skin to measure your blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) level. The watch lets you take an SpO2 reading whenever you like, though it doesn’t offer 24/7 SpO2 monitoring. 

As I discuss in my reviews of the Apple Watch Series 6 and the Fitbit Sense, this metric indicates how well your circulatory and respiratory systems are delivering oxygenated blood to your body, and can help you gauge whether a hospital visit is necessary. Ideally, your SpO2 level should be between 95% to 100%. Your SpO2 reading alone can’t diagnose COVID-19, but as the Yale School of Medicine advises, a reading below 90% may warrant a trip to the emergency room. As is the case with all consumer wearables, the Wyze Watch isn’t a medical device and isn’t intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent diseases, but its ability to measure your blood oxygen saturation is still useful.

In testing, the Wyze Watch provided fast, consistent, accurate SpO2 readings when compared with the Apple Watch Series 6. I took five readings on each watch, alternating between them each time. The Apple Watch gave me an average reading of 97.6%, while my average result on the Wyze Watch was 98%. 

The Series 6 measures your SpO2 level in 15 seconds. It took the Wyze Watch anywhere from around 12 to 30 seconds to give me a reading. 

Regardless of which wearable you choose, just remember to tighten the strap snugly and keep still during a reading for the most accurate results. 

Fitness and Health Tracking

While its ability to accurately measure your blood oxygen saturation level is impressive, the Wyze Wach’s other health tracking features are basic. 

Like the Wyze Band, the watch has an integrated run-tracking feature, but lacks support for other types of workouts. When you tap the watch’s Fitness Tracking app, it counts down for you to start, then begins tracking your calories burned, distance in miles, heart rate, pace, and time. 

To test its accuracy, I took it on a quick run/walk while wearing the Apple Watch Series 6, which features a built-in GPS to accurately track pace and distance, on my other wrist. For that almost 30-minute exercise, the Series 6 said I traveled 2.12 miles at an average pace of 13’43” per mile, had an average heart rate of 166bpm, and burned 222 total calories. The Wyze Watch said I only traveled 1.80 miles at 16’12” per mile, had an average heart rate of 151bpm, and burned 162 calories. 

Given the considerable difference, I would caution Wyze Watch wearers to take these calculations with a grain of salt. Note that I checked to make sure my personal information (body type, birth year, height, and weight) was all accurate in the Wyze app. Wyze says that if this data is inaccurate, your run data might be miscalculated, but that wasn’t the issue in this case. 

After tracking a run, you can visit the Data section of the Wyze app to view a graph of your heart rate throughout the run, and additional metrics including your heart rate range (maximum and minimum), average heart rate, and the amount of time you spent in each heart rate zone (relax, warm up, fat reduction, cardio, anaerobic, and peak). In the app’s Data section, it also shows your daily step count, calories burned, last SpO2 reading, last measured heart rate, and the duration of your sleep the previous night. You can click on each of these metrics for additional information as well as daily, weekly, and monthly graphs to track your stats.

The menstrual cycle tracker app predicts the date of your next period based on information you provide. When setting up this feature, you need to specify the average length of your cycle, the average length of your actual period, and the date of your last period.  

In the sleep app, it shows how much time you spent awake, in light sleep, and in deep slumber the previous night. Most other fitness trackers give you a sleep score based on the duration and quality of your shut eye, as well as recommendations to help improve your sleep, features you don’t get with the Wyze Watch. 

When I reviewed the Wyze Band last year, one of my complaints was that it didn’t show your progress toward fitness goals, or remind you to move if you’ve been inactive for too long, two standard features you get with most fitness trackers. Wyze recently added both of these features to the Band, and they are also available on the watch. 

If you enable its optional Stretch Reminders, the watch will encourage you to move after 50 minutes of inactivity. You can also set a start and end time, so the watch doesn’t remind you to move when you go to sleep. Its Activity Goal feature lets you set daily step and calorie burn targets. If enabled, it will notify you when you reach your goals. 

A Slight Smartwatch, But the Price Is Right

The $20 Wyze Watch (47mm) isn’t much of a smartwatch or a fitness tracker, but it does offer a few standout features that make it an attractive option for its low price. Perhaps most notably in the era of COVID-19, it features a blood oxygen saturation sensor that offers quick and accurate readings. Beyond that, it supports up to 10 smart home shortcuts that let you control compatible Wyze devices with a few taps. Just keep in mind that it doesn’t work with Amazon Alexa like the $25 Wyze Band, so you can’t use it to control non-Wyze gadgets. Its list of limitations is long, but for such an inexpensive wearable, we can’t complain too much. It’s a decent option if you already own Wyze smart home devices, or if you want to be able to measure your blood oxygen saturation on demand.

If you’re looking for a more capable fitness and health tracker, the Fitbit Inspire 2 is worth a look. It costs more at $99.95, but it offers 20 exercise shortcuts (as opposed to one on the Wyze Watch), automatically tracks certain activities, and comes with a one-year Fitbit premium subscription, which offers audio and video workouts as well as meditations with Deepak Chopra​. Smartwatches tend to cost even more, and the most affordable model we currently recommend is the $200 Garmin Lily, which can accurately track a number of advanced health stats and offers many useful widgets.