Blackview Smart Watch Guide

If your looking for a smartwatch for less than $50 the Blackview ID205L is one of the cheapest square smartwatches on the market. At such a bargain price, you’re probably wondering if it actually does what it claims and whether it’s worth investing in.
With this in mind, I purchased one to put it through its paces and I’m sharing my honest findings in this review.
Overall Verdict
The Blackview smartwatch is a cheap and simple smartwatch. Starting with the positives, it’s very comfortable to wear on your wrist. This is because it’s slim and lightweight due to its plastic build.
The best part of the device is the activity tracking. It can keep an eye on your daily fitness goals such as steps, calories burned, and distance traveled. It can also mirror your phone notifications, however, beyond this it doesn’t have a lot of other truly useful features.
If you want something a little smarter but still doesn’t break the bank, the Amazfit Bip U is a great choice. It has more detailed sports tracking thanks to extra sensors and the inclusion of GPS for tracking your routes.

Blackview is a Chinese electronics brand that sells smartphones, tablets, watches, and accessories in over 60 countries across the world.
The brand was first popularised by its rugged smartphone but has since expanded to sell a variety of electronics at budget prices, usually through Amazon.

What’s In The Box

The Blackview arrived in a basic white branded box. Inside were:

The watch.
A clip-on magnetic charger.
Instruction manual.
The charger only had a USB connection so you’ll need to source a wall adaptor if you don’t already have one.

Design & Build Quality
Starting with the design of the watch, it’s a square watch that looks very reminiscent of the Apple Watch from a distance. However, when you pick it up, you’ll immediately notice that it’s a lot lighter and made of plastic and you can tell it’s a cheap device.
Being lightweight and with a silicon rubber band, the watch is comfortable to wear, even when working out. You can also wear it whilst swimming or in the shower thanks to an IP68 waterproof rating which can withstand up to 1.5m of submersion in water.
The screen is 1.3” with a TFT touch screen display. The colors are vibrant and the resolution is well suited to the features of the watch. The display isn’t always-on but does come on whenever you lift your wrist so you can still use it as a regular watch for telling the time.
There’s a single button that acts as a back button or a home button when you hold it down. Given how simple the interface is and the fact that you cannot use the watch for messaging, one button seems adequate for navigation.

Features
The main features of the watch are fitness tracking and notification mirroring. I’ll come on to discuss both of these later in the article.
Aside from this, there are a few other utilities that came in useful from time to time such as the stopwatch and countdown timer. These are useful for simple tasks such as boiling an egg, however, you cannot set laps so you’ll still be reaching for your smartphone.
The watch also has basic media controls with play/pause/skip for songs playing on your phone. There’s no built-in music storage or third-party streaming apps so you cannot play music directly on the watch.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the alarm function to work on the Blackview and since it doesn’t mirror the alarm from your phone, I had no way of using the watch for a morning wake-up call.
With such few features, the user interface was simple to navigate and I could reach most screens within a few taps.