In an ever-growing and crowded smartwatch market like ours, it can be a time-consuming task to find a smart timepiece that checks all your needs without costing a lot. At ₹2,799, Ambrane Wise Eon Max comes poised to be one. Ambrane has been in the wearable space for a minute now but this has been my first time wearing its smartwatch. I have used the Ambrane watch for a week and here is my experience.
Ambrane Wise Eon Max has a squircle display that stretches 2.01 inches. The bezels on the top and the two sides are negligible. The bottom one is comparatively thicker. The screen is colourful, bright and smooth at 240x283 resolution, 550 nits of luminance, and 60 Hz of refresh rate. Although you get 100+ watch faces to choose from, they are hardly unique or attractive.
The chassis is of polished nickel colour and the connected silicone bands are of brown chocolate colour. The watch feels decently built and looks okay on the wrist. The Ambrane branding is present subtly on the strap, at the base of the watch and on the face of the crown.
Ambrane has also equipped the watch with IP68 dust and water resistance. So, design and build-wise, it’s a fine smartwatch.
However, the interface inside and the software within the app are very basic.
Swipe up from the bottom of the main screen to get to the menu of all apps. It’s a list with coloured icons for each app or feature. But it looks dull, probably because of the dark grey background. If you want to, you can change the menu mode to a honeycomb style, but that in my opinion makes finding an app more difficult.
Now, in case like me you also mistake of pressing the crown opens the menu, but it doesn’t. Pressing it takes you back to the previous screen and finally to the home screen. When you are on the home screen and you tap the crown, it turns off the display. Clicking it again turns on the screen.
Swiping right from the left edge of the screen shows a sidebar with your favourite apps, weather, time, date, and day. I don’t find the relevance of the time shown here.
Anyways, swiping left shows the widgets like games, AI assistant, voice assistant, beats per minute, blood oxygen, sleep, music controls, etc.
Swiping downwards from the home screen shows the quick controls.
I don’t think there is a notification tray where one can find all the notifications from the phone. The notifications do appear on the watch in real time. There isn’t just a place where one can find older/missed out notifications. I think the company should have mapped the crown or one of the swipes to open a notification tray.
Even the app is very barebones or you may find it straightforward and good enough. It is called Da Fit which again sounds uninspiring. I think Ambrane should come up with an app named Ambrane “something”.
Like most recent smartwatch releases in India, this one also comes with Bluetooth calling capability thanks to a built-in microphone, speaker, and dialer. The call quality is passable as long as you are not so far from the phone.
Coming to the actual tracking performance, there have been one or two instances wherein the watch wasn’t triggering the sensors (in the case of the SpO2 tracker, I believe) and instead, it asked me to fasten it tightly. I exited and rerun the app which activated the sensors.
When it worked, the stats were close but did not exactly match the Apple Watch Series 8 which I was wearing alongside for test purposes. In a 34-minute workout, a difference of 8 KCAL in calorie count and 12 BPM in heart rate count. When I tried manually running the heart rate and SpO2 tracker, the Wise Eon Max was throwing similar results as the Apple Watch. This impressed me!
The same can’t be said about sleep tracking though. The sleep duration was more on the Ambrane watch by 37 minutes.
So, tracking-wise some things are commendable while not quite much in other cases. Overall, the watch should still be usable for a general idea of your activity level and fitness progress.
Using the watch for days at large shouldn’t be a problem either as the battery life is also long. The brand claims up to 10 days and I think the Wise Eon Max could keep its word. The bundled pogo-pin charger takes about 2 hours to fill the battery from 0 to 100.
Well, that’s a quick run through my experience and here’s what I finally think.
Ambrane has packed a reasonable working fitness tracker in a basic-looking smartwatch. This could easily get lost in a crowd of smartwatches from more established brands. Therefore, if Ambrane wants to stand out from the crowd, it needs to push the envelope, or the very least offer something so appealing in the design of both the hardware and software of its wearables. That said, for the average person who just wants a smartwatch for the sub-₹3k price tag that gets the basics fairly right, this one's very well worth considering.
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