If you’re in the market for a wearable that isn’t made by an unholy union of Google and Samsung, Vivo’s Watch 3, newly launched in South Africa, would like you to turn your attention in its direction. The smartwatch borrows some of the design aesthetics of the more popular Android wearables but the Chinese company has taken steps to make this one its own.
Mostly this comes down to a proprietary operating system, Origin OS. It’s based on Android so it should work with your device (and most of the third-party apps that exist for wearables) but it doesn’t have to say Android right on the front of the box. So there.
Watch 3: Watch hard with a vengeance
Vivo’s Watch 3 features a mostly compact wristwatch design, without the massive chonk that makes some wristwear a chore to carry around. Despite this, Vivo promises a sixteen-day battery life from the device. It’s a claim we’re keen to test because we’re not quite ready to believe it on the company’s say-so. Particularly not because the wearable also features an always-on display — that’s got to cut the battery life down some.
The 466 x 466 display touch display is augmented by a Smart Digital Crown (totally not like the one found on an Apple Watch), which enhances navigation on the Watch 3. The watch performs the full suite of tracking — heart-rate, blood oxygen, stress, sleep, and anything else that can be divined by watching your blood and or temperature change on your wrist — while supporting a waterproof rating of five atmospheres (or 50 metres, if you’re planning on diving that deep).
The watch’s faces are customisable, 113 sports are tracked, and then there’s the “Advanced Multi-Channel Star Ring layout [that] enhances tracking precision, offering 8-channel heart rate monitoring and 16-channel blood oxygen monitoring”. Sounds like something Apple might do. That’s probably the point of the marketing schpiel.
The Vivo Watch 3 is currently available from Vodacom (though it’s not officially live at the time of writing), with other outlets coming in the next few months. Stuff will hopefully have one in to play with very soon.
