The Amazon Prime Day Sale are almost here and while the sale doesn’t officially start until Tuesday, July 16, some of the earliest known Amazon Prime Day Smartwatch Deals are already live.
Historically, Amazon Prime Day is a chance to best apple watches, best garmin watchesbest running watches, or even the best golf watches at a hefty discount, potentially saving hundreds of dollars or pounds. Cheap fitness trackers are also in the mix, so you can grab a band like the Huawei band 7 or Fitbit Inspire 3 for a song.
The very cheapest deals, however, are always reserved for watches with names on Amazon like (and this is literally) “Smartwatch for Men and Women, Answer/Call, 1.85″ Smartwatch, Fitness Tracker Watch with Heart Rate, Blood Pressure, Sleep Monitor, 140+ Sports, IP68 Waterproof, Pedometer Watch Compatible with Android IOS.” Gripping.
The reason this smartwatch is called this is so that it appears in more searches for those keywords, so a shopper searching for “fitness tracker with heart rate” will find it higher in the list of results. I’ve been seeing more and more of these very inexpensive watches this year, even in the “suggested” listings when I search for keywords like “Apple Watch” or “Garmin Watch.”
Those keyword-heavy listings work, and Amazon doesn’t appear to penalize retailers for gaming the system, so they must be bought. I suppose it makes sense: the similarly priced $20 / £15 / AU$26 Casio F-91W is, after all, the best-selling watch in the world.
The big difference here is that the Casio F-91W is notoriously ultra-reliable, and it’s also ultra-cheap. I’m not going to wax lyrical about it (you can read my love letter to this one Casio watch is the best $15 I ever spent (here), but I can tell you that these cheap smartwatches are not nearly as reliable as the humble plastic Casio.
The Smart Watch for Men and Women that Answer/Make a Call is actually produced by a company called AcclaFit, and I had the dubious pleasure of last year i tried one as part of a “$20 challenge” article. I was initially impressed with the number of features offered, but found that the lack of precision in most features made it virtually useless for anything more than a rough estimate.
I also tested a cheap fitness tracker, the Viido tracker, in a comparable price range compared to a top Garmin watch and concluded that it was unusable. In fact, it was potentially dangerous, because it provided false information to people looking for accurate fitness statistics.
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 away—to a server somewhere for purposes unknown. Most branded smartwatches have privacy policies that outline how your data is handled: Apple published a white paper about how it handles its users’ health data , and even Google is subject to the GDPR and other data protection laws.
I got stuck trying to track down the privacy policies of AcclaFit and Viido. Viido’s website was hilariously flagged by my computer’s antivirus software, so I decided not to look any further. AcclaFit has no online presence, other than a Facebook group with about 20 followers. I got a little further by locating its 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 basically sells industrial manufacturing equipment and consumer health trackers.
So if they’re nearly useless as wearables and potentially harmful when it comes to using your data, the bottom line is: don’t fall for them, 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 about doing so – even as a gift. Instead, check out the great deals on more useful devices and buy a tracker that’s actually good for spending a little more money.