Inbase Urban Lite review: Good entry-level smartwatch, half-baked fitness tracker
What's the story
Having a tiny computer wrapped around your wrist is no longer a costly affair. In fact, for around Rs. 5,000, you can buy a smartwatch that offers a wealth of features, fitness tracking, a stylish and durable design, and compatibility with your iOS and Android-based smartphone. The Incase Urban Lite promises all this and more. But is it worth it?
Design
Incase Urban Lite: At a glance
The Urban Lite looks exactly like the Huami Amazfit GTS smartwatch, with an aluminum case and a standard silicone strap. The right side of the case has a small power-cum-home button. The smartwatch is also IP68-rated, meaning it can survive rain or shower. However, with thick bezels around the screen, the usable area is much smaller than the actual 45mm case.
Screen view
How is the display?
The Urban Lite has a 1.4-inch color LCD panel with a resolution of 240x240 pixels. The touch response is acceptable, the screen has six levels of brightness and the legibility is decent in indoor situations. However, under sunlight or high ambient light, it all looked washed out and we had to adjust our wrist position to improve readability.
Features
Before the fitness features, let's talk about the smartwatch stuff
The Urban Lite uses Bluetooth 4.0 to connect to your smartphone via the company's Da Fit app. The process is simple and the connection is reliable. You can swipe up from the home screen to navigate through various features. On the device, you can set watch faces, control music and camera shutter, check weather, start an activity, and monitor health parameters in real-time.
Interface
The Da Fit app is the backbone
While you can view basic, single-day information on the watch, you will have to turn to the Da Fit app for a detailed summary of your activity or health parameters. The app is also required for adding watch faces (on the device, you only get four watch faces), turn on/off smartphone notifications, set reminders for menstrual management, and other settings-related changes.
Information
We got 5-6 days of battery life
The company claims up to 7-days battery life on the Urban Lite and we got a good 5-days of usage with maximum brightness and plenty of toying around. Further, the watch took around 2-hours to be fully charged via the supplied charger.
Fitness
Plenty of fitness features on offer; some are just unreliable
The Urban Lite offers activity tracking for running, cycling, skipping, basketball, football and others. It also houses sensors for monitoring heart-rate, blood pressure, sleep, and blood oxygen. However, the health parameters were unreliable. We got numbers that were often lower than what was detected on an oximeter or blood pressure monitor. That said, these features are designed for general wellness and not medical diagnostics.
Our verdict
Is it worth the money?
At Rs. 4,999, the Urban Lite offers a good build quality, decent hardware, great battery life, and a slew of features. The app is pretty neat and provides detailed analysis of your fitness regime as well as health parameters. Long story short, it is a good platform-agnostic smartwatch to enter the world of wearables provided you are not looking for highly accurate health statistics.