I thought my days of wearing a smartwatch were over, after making the switch to dumb watches and relying instead on a smart ring, but the chance to try out a $65 Apple Watch clone proved too intriguing to refuse!
I fully expected it to be pretty terrible. But while I wouldn’t recommend buying the WithIt Giga instead of an Apple Watch, I was actually quite pleasantly surprised …
Look & feel
There are, of course, counterfeit Apple Watches out there. These replicate both design and packaging, and are sold to some unknown mix of people who want the look without the price tag and people who are being scammed, thinking they’re buying the real thing.
The Giga isn’t one of those. It does look similar to an Apple Watch at first glance, but isn’t pretending to be one. The overall form factor is the same, but there are enough visual differences that it wouldn’t fool anyone familiar with one. For example, the casing protrudes around the equivalent of the Digital Crown, and there are conventional watch lugs to attach the band.
The watch faces also look nothing like Apple ones. The standard one shown above has very prominent WithIt branding, and the activity and health stat displays are much more basic than Apple’s exercise rings.
There’s a celebratory face with balloons which shows just the date, time, and step-count; there’s one which is very vaguely reminiscent of the panel graphics in Star Trek: TNG; and two analogue faces, one of which is ugly, and the other really ugly!
In short, anyone buying this hoping people will mistake it for an Apple Watch is going to be very sorely disappointed.
Functionality
Giga offers much the same health and fitness monitoring as the Apple Watch, and most such devices these days, including:
- Heart rate
- Blood oxygen
- Steps
- Exercise minutes
- Sleep time
- Stress level
There’s a Workout equivalent, with support for a solid range of activities. Additionally, you can toggle on reminders to move and to drink water. You can also choose to sync the health and activity data to the Apple Health app, either permitting all data to be shared or toggling on/off individual data items.
You get a remote camera button, but it’s literally just a red shutter button: no viewfinder feature, and no controls. You also get the option of music controls, for Apple Music and Spotify.
You can sync with your Apple Calendar, and a world clock supports up to six time-zones.
You can make and receive phone calls from the Watch (via a Bluetooth connection to the iPhone – there’s no cellular capability).
Finally, you can receive any notification on the watch, with individual toggles for popular messaging apps (Messages, Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, and Snapchat), along with things like email. Beyond those, it’s all-or-nothing, via an ‘Other apps’ toggle.
In use
It perhaps feels a little cheap compared to the real thing – especially the band – but the finish and build quality seem decent. Battery life is excellent, going several days between charges.
There’s a raise-to-wake feature which proved reliable (with the same ability to set working hours for this, so it doesn’t wake you in bed), and the screen is bright, colorful, and easy to read.
The functionality provided by the controls is crude. Pressing the digital crown acts as a manual wake button when off, and a Home button when on. Rotating it from the home screen simply switches between watch faces, which is arguably the least-useful thing it could possibly do since I rarely changed mine on my Apple Watch, and would never change the mostly-ugly ones on this.
The side button opens the workouts screen, with the digital crown letting you scroll through them and select.
The ‘apps’ are accessed by swiping from the left side of the screen. This displays the weather, and provides one-touch access to the five most recently-used apps, with a 6th button bringing up the full list. The digital crown then scrolls through these.
I tested heart-rate, steps, and sleep monitoring against my Oura Ring (which was in turn more accurate than my Apple Watch). Heart-rate and step accuracy was remarkably good. It over-estimated sleep time when I wore it for one night, logging 7h 49m against the 7h 21m recorded by my Oura Ring, but my Apple Watch did the same thing to about the same extent.
Conclusions
I’m honestly impressed by just how much tech you get for a pretty incredible $65. If someone wanted to test out whether a smart watch is for them, or you wanted to give something to a younger kid, you could do worse.
More than anything, this is a sign of just how incredibly cheap no-brand tech can get while still delivering decent performance. Indeed, there’s a whole bunch of these things on Amazon for as little as $30.
That said, however, you get could a pre-owned Apple Watch SE on eBay for roughly the same money as the Giga, and in most cases that would be a significantly better option. It was fascinating to try, though!
Highlighted accessories
The WithIt Giga costs $65 from the company’s website.
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