I spent a week with an affordable smartwatch and here’s how it fared

Published On: June 1, 2017

“Retailing for Rs 5K, does the Noise Loop pack enough punch to find a place on your wrist?”

Smartwatches are no longer a rare sight. In fact, googling the term ‘’smartwatch’’ will bring up links to buy one from a myriad of different vendors. Unlike the early days, smartwatches can be now picked up for relatively cheap if one doesn’t resort to buying from the usual suspects such as Apple or Samsung. One such smartwatch recently came to our labs, dubbed the Noise Loop. Having spent some time with it strapped around my wrist, here’s what I think of it.

Have you ever wondered why a McDonald’s burger doesn’t look as juicy as it does in the ads? Well, if you have, then you might not like how the Noise Loop watch looks in real life either. All the advertisements of the watch make it seem like it has been constructed from premium metal. However, the watch is as light as a feather and the metal casing feels oddly plasticky too. Coupled with the wobbly physical buttons, the design of the smartwatch didn’t really wow me.

1 of 5

The watch has a 1.3-inch display which sports a resolution of 240 x 240 pixels. Unsurprisingly, most of the text and the app icons on the watch seem pixelated. The display is touch sensitive, though the small size of the screen at times required me to swipe multiple times before my touch got registered. The watch comes with six pre-loaded watch faces, but you have the option to download some more using the companion app. Each watch face shows different elements on the smartwatch such as the step-counter, the temperature and so on. Turning on and pairing the smartwatch is fairly simple, and I was able to connect my OnePlus 3 smartphone to the watch effortlessly. However, downloading the compatible app for the smartwatch was a much more tedious process, requiring me to download a QR scanner on my smartphone to read the app code off a pre-loaded app within the smartwatch.

1 of 3

Despite its design quirks, the watch comes with a bunch of tricks up its sleeve. There are a lot of fitness-related features such as a step tracker and a heart rate sensor, and they work flawlessly for the most part. I did find that the watch overestimates the distance I had traveled at times but then again, it is hard to find a fitness tracker which is accurate down to the decimal, especially below Rs 5K. The watch can be synchronised with the provided app to showcase your metrics in a consolidated manner. Other than that, the app is a pretty standard affair and doesn’t offer anything unique in terms of features.

Reducing the time a user spends gazing at their smartphone’s screen was the initial sales pitch for smartwatches when they were first introduced to the global market. The Noise Loop watch comes with notification support too, sparing you from having to take out your smartphone every time you receive a message or a call. The watch can show notifications from a wide variety of apps such as Fenix (Twitter client) and Uber. For messaging services like Whatsapp, the watch will show you the sender’s name along with a portion of the text message. You can then tap on the sender’s name to view the complete message, however, the message cuts out if it is too long. I experienced no delay in receiving the notifications, but the interaction was limited and besides viewing which app sent me the notification, I couldn’t do much else.

Some other notable features of the watch include music playback support wherein, you can control the music being played on your smartphone. The watch also comes with support for Siri and Google Now, which worked like a charm. To make use of this functionality, buyers will have to scroll through the list of pre-installed apps and find an app icon labelled Siri. From there, simply tapping the ‘Siri’ icon on the watch brings up a prompt to speak to your phone and I found myself using this functionality multiple times over the course of my testing to find the best route back home. Another added advantage of the Noise Loop watch is that it comes with a speaker which comes in handy when you have to tend to a call while driving.

Despite not being the most attractive smartwatch, the Noise Loop gets a lot of things right. It offers a good return on the initial investment of Rs 5K, offers notification support and extensive fitness features making it a good option for budget buyers. If you can make-do with a subpar build quality, then the Noise Loop watch will not disappoint you.