Smart watches have evolved from being glamorous arm accessories to essential connected devices. It has extended itself outside the boundaries of notifying and telling time. Now, these devices can track your steps, calories burned, and even control drones. Cherry Fit is not alien to this; and Cherry Mobile – the same company that brought us G1 and G2 smartwatches – has successfully tried to bring the renewed image and function of smart watches to their market… well, except for control drones.
We review the Cherry Fit.
Cherry Fit, in all honesty, bears the overall look and feel of the Huawei Talkband. It has a detachable watch face, which doubles as a bluetooth headset. If you’re a fan of Transformers, you would be surprised with how you can magically detach it from the band, and put it on your ears. It has a band in faux-leather flair with 10 watchband holes. Regular watchbands wouldn’t fit on the its frame, so you’re stuck with bands that Cherry Mobile might sell in the future.
The watch face is made of plastic, but was made very well and striking elegance. The gold variant looks more elegant, but men would likely prefer the black one. Its vertical slightly-curved display is touch enabled, which allows users to navigate through its tracking features. There is no tap-to-wake mechanism, so you are left of with either pressing the switch on its right side or flipping your wrist to wake the screen up. The latter may be enabled via the Cherry Fit application, which you may easily download via Android Play Store.
We never had any troubles installing the application and pairing the watch with our LG G5. We also managed to install this on our Zenfone 2 Special Edition and Cherry Mobile Touch XL 2 without any issues. There were several times when the watch got disconnected from our phone, but we were able to reconnect it by simply resetting the watch.
Its slightly inaccurate tracking mechanism is quite a letdown. For instance, our Moto 360 tracked 5,523 steps, our ASUS VivoWatch monitored 5,397 steps while Cherry Fit only managed to detect 4,623. The 700+ margin is – in our books – a little disappointing, but doesn’t make us think that the device is useless.
While not advertised fully, Cherry Fit can display notifications on its screen. You can select the applications that you wish to display on the screen via the Notification Settings of the Cherry Fit android application. The screen might be too small, but it can be useful to show essential information about notifications of your preferred applications.
As mentioned earlier, the watch doubles as a bluetooth headset. It works well indoors, but it isn’t loud enough for me to hear the other person on the other line when I’m outdoors. You can answer and end calls by pressing its switch. When you’re done using it, it’s up to you if want to wear it on your ear, or just simply put it back on the band. Convenient. Clever.
Battery isn’t bad either. It can last for 2 days, tops, at moderate usage; 1 day if you use it as your daily bluetooth headset.
Priced at PhP3,499, Cherry Fit is currently being sold at select Cherry Mobile stores nationwide. Huawei isn’t going easy on Cherry Mobile though. Since Cherry’s official announcement, Huawei dropped the price of their 1st gen talkband to PhP2,999; and they have been actively promoting and selling Huawei Band for PhP2,999 as well.
Overall, the watch is a pretty solid device, infused with essential features for monitoring your “papayat-din-ayoko” lifestyle. Its lack of sleep tracker is a bit of downer, but definitely not a dealbreaker.
Giancarlo Viterbo is a Filipino Technology Journalist, blogger and Editor of gadgetpilipinas.net, He is also a Geek, Dad and a Husband. He knows a lot about washing the dishes, doing some errands and following instructions from his boss on his day job. Follow him on twitter: @gianviterbo and @gadgetpilipinas.
