Fake Chinese Smartwatch Review

You just bought yourself a headache.

I love experiments. They educate the masses by either success or failure and in the end everyone wins, except you. Because you're sitting there holding a $30 hunk of crap, $30 short from buying the real deal that everyone else is now buying because you told them so, and it's all because you care for some reason. That's how I sort of felt until I sent it back the same day thanks to Amazon's return policy. So here I am, with a fake smartwatch from the land where copyright gets lost in translation and also the land that gave us orange chicken, begging you to not buy cheap electronics from unknown places because you'll probably end up with something like this.

Totally a Samsung. No doubt in my mind.

China has been pretty famous in the new lately for their exploding self balancing personal transporters better known as "not-hoverboards". Now I'm not saying all Chinese manufacturing is bad, there's just the many parts of it that crank out low priced garbage with no quality control to rip off ill informed Westerners. So what happens if you want to buy something from the land of the cheap be it a game console, a phone, or even a smartwatch? You know, to save a Ben Frankin or two off that Moto 360? For today's field test, enter the the Hamswan Smartwatch, or is it really? I've found this thing under about a million different names and brands, much like the "not-hoverboards". So for now we'll just call it the Generic Chinese Smartwatch as it's physically impossible to determine this thing's origin. Straight away I noticed that the box was a blatant copy of Samsung's style, minus all the nice graphics and instead you get a line-art image of what is clearly a Samsung Gear 2. Already this is looking very terrifying, so with my sanity still protecting me I opened the box.

A real Gear 2 superimposed over the Chinese watch.

Okay, the first thing you'll see is the watch itself and I'm not gonna lie, it's build quality isn't that bad at all, but they coined the term "gilded" for a reason. It looks pretty damn close to the Gear 2 with a few distinguishable features on it. It surprised me even more that the top of the watch is actually real metal. Probably not high quality metal but metal nonetheless, and the watch band is feels nice to the touch and it's highly adjustable. It's not at all bad feeling for a watch and it's comfortable to wear too. Granted I'm certain the real Gear 2 feels notably more premium than this thing but not a bad effort, even for a knockoff. But lets dig a little deeper.

Under the battery hides a microSD slot and a SIM card slot.

Okay so the watch uses a single micro USB port on the side to charge and transfer files unlike the Gear 2's proprietary charge base. The problem is that this port is cover up by a silicon cover with requires you to have the fingernails of a witch in order for you to get under and open it. The back cover is even worse which requires said fingernails but made of steel to open it up. Seriously, I almost ripped my thumb nail off trying to open this thing and I had to uses flathead screwdriver as a result. The plastic quality seems to have dropped a bit under the cover as it feels thinner and I can see stress marks where the back cover snaps into place. Once you take out the tiny little battery you find a SIM card slot and a microSD slot. Neither of which I bothered with, so I sealed it back up and powered this thing on which was probably the worst mistake I could make at this point.

Again, more evidence that this watch comes from some place in the depths of Hell.

Okay watch is on and now things get from semi-promising to absolutely comical bullshit. I'll say that the screen looks fine but it's also just the right amount of wrong off center from the middle of the watch. If you have massive OCD you will notice that the screen is just a bit too far up, and that bothers me a bit. The first thing that shows up when you turn the watch on isn't Hamswan or even some other knockoff brand, it's a fucking stock image of the same watch. It's as if they thought you forgot what you had just bought. Then a jingle plays that sounds pretty much like every other jingle most knockoff devices make and it shows the logo. And when I say logo, I mean something that looks like it was made in Microsoft Word that literally says "Smart Watch". It's as if they knew how shitty the forthcoming OS was that they didn't even bother the give the device a unique name or branding. Okay, past that it gives you the watch face which you can change between three dull options when you tap it. Also to note, it again says Smart Watch on the watch face again reminding you that you did not buy a Samsung, you bought something much worse.

You don't want to use either of them.

Swiping the the watch face unlocks the main menu and the transition is immediate. No smooth animation like on your phone, just boom, there. The only place on the watch that has a smooth animation is the apps page. I'm going to take this moment to say that this watch runs off a bootleg OS that resembles Android which I find funny because I figured the manufacturers of trash like this have moved on to using the tried and true open source OS a long time ago. I'm not going to go into too much depth with the apps because I tried most of them and some work but most don't and all of them have the absolute worst fucking user interface on the planet.

If you have hands the size of trashcan lids, good luck.

Here's probably the best example out of all of the apps I could choose from, the phone. First of all there isn't anything wrong with it at first glance but what they effectively did was take a normal keypad from a phone and shrank it down to fit on a screen that's barely over an inch big. Unless fingers have the diameter of a toothpick it's difficult to hit anything you want to hit. Apart from that it's intended function is fine but the rest of the device totally makes you not give a shit enough to use it.

All of them are terrible.

You hit the menu button on the main screen to access the apps page. This thing has a crap ton of them, and from the majority I've dug through in this list, they are all terrible. Some of them either don't work and either give you an error message or are just empty. All of them look like the UI was lifted straight from a bad flip phone from 2003 and trying to navigate some of them requires a sextant and a diverse knowledge of the heavens. Some apps are completely pointless altogether like the radio which does not work, although the watch does have a speaker which in the whole time of me using it has only been used once for the power on jingle. The camera, while it's probably the only app with a UI that's easy enough to figure out, was the final nail in the coffin for this watch. I wasn't expecting much out of a smartwatch camera to begin with but after looking at some sample shots taken with a Gear, which for a watch actually look pretty darn good let me just say this... this camera is just... oh my god...

Circa 1990.

If you can't tell, that's the Enzo Ferrari I have on my wall compared to the camera on the oldest device I have available right now, a Motorola RAZR V3, it's worse, like way worse. This camera has magical time travelling abilities as it actually takes pictures that look worse than those off a Polaroid camera. And on that bombshell I powered it off, boxed it back up, sent it straight back to Amazon, and proceeded to disinfect myself from head to toe to rid myself of the disease that is this watch. I will give it credit where it's due though, it's built alright, feels fairly nice which you can expect since it's take it's design directly from the Gear 2 anyways, and it does the few things it can to an extent. But the OS and just how rough, cheap, fake, outdated, and terrible feeling it is use and look at totally ruins the experience, whatever experience there was to begin with that is. I know for $30 I can't expect it to be that good but I'd say this thing is bad even for $30. The main reason why you would buy a watch like this or any substitute for expensive main brand products is to save a buck and you definitely do, but you buy a vastly inferior product with a plethora of problems that just the make the added expense of the real deal seem much less dismal. And yeah, I do get that the Apple Watch, Moto 360, and whatever new Gear out there is pretty expensive but they actually do what they set out to do unlike this hunk of crap that tries to imitate them in every conceivable way; I guarantee you'll be much happier with something of that quality compared to this Chinese Smartwatch. This thing is fucking garbage.