Colmi's smartwatch talks a big game with its naming scheme but its reality lives much closer to its R1,900 price point. It'll facilitate basic workout tracking and looks good enough to wear daily, with the standouts being the battery life and a couple of quirky features. Whether that makes up for its failings is really up to you and, more likely, your budget.
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Design
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Features
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Battery
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Tracking
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Value
The Colmi i28 Ultra smartwatch is an interesting budget option if you’re an active individual interested in an affordable, low-maintenance fitness tracking with just enough features to justify usefulness outside of a sporting context. It skimps on RAM, CPU, and overall build to give you more in sensor accuracy (though this is still lacking). If you can get past the underwhelming UI and the slightly confusing app, then there’s at least something packed into the Colmi i28 Ultra that you can find space for in daily life.
Skin Trade
Our version of the i28 came with a silicone magnetic strap that sits surprisingly comfortably around the wrist. The multi-panel design allows it to adapt to your wrist shape, plus it makes adjusting tightness super quick and easy. Another surprise was how good it looks for a fitness watch. The bronze-looking zinc alloy bezel adds just enough class to justify wearing it with a more formal outfit, though that’s no excuse to pair it with a tuxedo. The double colour makes transitioning between different outfits, from sports to office wear, easier.
Out of the box, the i28 Ultra comes with a small charger and a screen protector kit, which is much needed for the scratch-happy 1.43in screen. The AMOLED screen supplies high contrast, making colours pop and text a bit more legible. It’s bright enough — at 1000 nits it remains legible even in bright conditions.
Internally, the watch runs on a JL7013A6S processor, with 640KB of RAM, which explains the sluggish animations, and 256MB of storage. That means it’s pretty quick to overwrite information, especially (oddly enough) with infrequent use. The IP86 rating means you don’t need to stress when you get near water, but we wouldn’t advise pushing it beyond a very light shower.
The i28 Ultra’s best feature by far is incredible battery life. Colmi’s watch goes from zero to over 90% in around 90 minutes. Once fully charged, it lasts over a week with moderate use. We wish it had a better low battery notification, though, because the lengthy battery life makes it easy to forget to charge the device.
Running on a prayer
The watch comes with well over 100 exercise modes, making the Colmi i28 Ultra a fantastic sports companion. Unfortunately, these cover little more than heart rate and distance measurement. Many pricier competitors offer the same limited functionality, so there’s that to it.
The Colmi app is better than expected, though that’s not saying much. The sterile white and blue colour scheme isn’t exactly thrilling. It allows users to track heart rate, weight, sleep, steps, and menstrual tracking, but with no in-depth analysis of the data. Users can download free watch faces on the app, and the suite of installed faces is just fine. You’ll manage to find two or three you like, and for most of us, that’s good enough.
The Colmi i28 Ultra is packed with miscellaneous features for the modern working person. Keen r/wallstreetbets junkies can load up to five different stocks to continually keep track of at all times. There are also a few games like Sudoku and a Flappy Bird knock-off, for emergencies when you need to pass the time without your phone.
Other cool features include the ability to add e-cards and use the watch for NFC payments. Colmi’s ChatGPT-powered “DaGPT” is a fun extra addition, too, though we much prefer typing.
If you’re Muslim, this watch gets extra points for you. The Muslim prayer function reminds you to pray the standard five times a day. There are also prayer beads and prayer notifications — the perfect companion for a man looking to strengthen his relationship with Allah. Unfortunately, we do not fall in that group, so for us it’s just bloatware. Little features like these help make the Colmi i28 Ultra a quirkier choice for the right person, though.
Colmi i28 Ultra verdict
The Colmi i28 Ultra is like an odd little onion that gets more and more interesting the more layers you peel off. It’s got an unassuming look that allows it to be more fashionably versatile than it has any right to be. The plain UI, though uninspiring, could be worse (cough, cough Garmin). That was almost enough to distract us from the fact that you get much of the same stuff as you would expect from a budget midrange watch (like variable tracking accuracy), as well as some fun and unique features. These can make the device far more worthwhile if you can find regular use for them in your daily life. But if you’re not into some combination of fitness, finances, AI, and Islam, then you may need to keep looking. The Colmi i28 Ultra retails for around R1,900 on Takealot.
