Good fitness technology should not be restricted by price. Just like everyone deserves the opportunity to exercise, eat healthy, and be the best version of themselves, the technology that makes this easier should be available to as many people as possible.
The wearables on our list of best cheap fitness trackers are generally very good, able to accurately track the wearer’s heart rate, calories burned, sleep, exercise, and allow the wearer to see text messages and other notifications on their wrist. Most of these trackers start around $50 / £45 / AU$85, although the best smartwatches from the likes of Garmin and Apple are often already quite expensive.
While browsing through our guide to cheap fitness trackers, I suddenly had an idea: What if they got even cheaper? With some fitness trackers being sold in local pound stores (equivalent to UK dollar stores and other similar discount outlets) for a pittance, I’m starting to wonder if they can hold a candle to the entry-level efforts of top-of-the-line Fitbit and Huawei. Our physique.
So, I went ahead and picked one, and analyzed it the same way I would any other smartwatch — by comparing it to the best of the watch’s performance benchmarks and checking how accurate its benchmarks were.
Viido fitness tracker: design and features
The Viido fitness tracker, a Chinese-made product, was purchased at Poundland for £13 ($16 in the US, or AU$22.69 in Australia). It’s a simple tracker with a plastic pebble-shaped face and a silicone band. When I first opened the box it didn’t come with any instructions, and an extra charger that didn’t seem to fit. Looking online, it turns out that others who’ve had it have some basic instructions, and because I’m so used to magnetic chargers it took a full 10 minutes before I realized you needed to pry the plastic pebble out of the silicone case to reveal a charging socket underneath the pebble. good start.
The watch gives you three days of claimed battery life. The unit is all plastic, except for the watch’s internals, and weighs barely a thing. An LED sensor on the back is built in to monitor heart rate, calories, etc., while a touch-sensitive button featuring a small circular sticker acts as an all-purpose action button on the watch. You can press it repeatedly to cycle through your options, and hold it for two seconds to select something. It can get pretty tedious if there are more than a few options to scroll through, but surprisingly the watch does a good job of keeping things simple.
The Viido tracker gives you a home “status” function that reads the steps you’ve taken and calories burned that day, a heart rate monitor, an SPO2 blood oxygen sensor, and a blood pressure monitor (which I was very hesitant about: even the best LED sensors suffer from pressure Blood, which gave rise to the Huawei Watch D), sports modes (steps, sit and skip only, oddly enough), weather, and basic music controls, which allow you to pause, play, skip, or go back to the beginning of a track.
In order to get everything to work, you have to download the Yoho Sports app, a lousy piece of software that I was (and still am) a bit worried about cloning my phone or scraping my bank details. It has basic settings, including the ability to toggle features like the internal gyroscope, which allows the watch’s motion sensor to bring the screen to life when you raise your arm, and allows you to swap out the watch face with one of a dozen or so pre-generated wallpapers. The app also allows you to set your height, weight, age, and other stats, presumably for more accurate recordings.
All in all, a good set of features for $16 / £13 / AU$22.50. But how does all this work in practice? To test it, I compared its performance to that of my favorite fitness watch from last year: the Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar, which retails for about thirty times the price of the Viido. Is Fiido a rip-off? Are his health stats accurate? And if it’s really accurate, why do people pay all this money for premium fitness trackers?
Viido fitness tracker: Performance
First, the tracker is incredibly strong to slide in and out of the silicone band. I really thought I was going to break it, or it wasn’t supposed to come out that way, before I found the charging port and figured I was doing the right thing. It wasn’t intuitive at all. After I pulled it out, the pebble took three hours to charge three days’ worth of juice. The Forerunner takes less than an hour and gives you about three weeks, and even the Fitbit Inspire 3 offers seven days of life on a full charge.
Once it charged, I placed it next to the Forerunner and started the heart rate monitor. The Viido doesn’t have an always-on heart rate monitor; You have to activate it manually before it will display a snapshot of your heart rate readings. I was sitting still, but my heart rate was swinging wildly from the 50’s to the 20’s, while my forelegs sat firmly around the 68-72 mark. Sigh: So far, as expected. I swapped the tracker for my other wrist and headed for coffee.
Once I got back, I had a pleasant surprise: The Viido tracker was accurate to within 150 steps of my Forerunner readings. At least that was one measure I could count on. I tried the blood oxygen sensor, got a 92, and my presenter got (to my delight) a 93. An accurate blood oxygen reading from a fitness tracker that costs about the same as a movie ticket! Featured. Music controls worked fine from my phone too, but that’s where the good things ended for me.
I was very disappointed with the lack of exercise options (only three, and no running!), with no way to change them within the app. The custom watch faces you could select through the app didn’t fill the screen, but appeared as a grainy picture-in-picture, as if you were viewing a photo of someone on a mobile phone. I couldn’t tell what resolution the screen was on the Viido: neither the packaging, nor Poundland’s website, told me. When Viido’s official website was flagged by my antivirus, I decided not to stare any further.
Although it is claimed that the watch can record your sleep and display it in the Yoho app, it has not. I wore it for two nights and got absolutely no sleep data, and there’s no toggle I can find to give it permission to do so. It frequently unpaired and re-paired (I was getting three or four notifications a day that my fitness tracker was “connected” again) and future walks were nowhere near as accurate on steps, missing the mark by a few thousand steps at the end of the day.
All in all, even at the price I paid for it, this tracker is a waste of money. At best, you can tell the time, control your music as you walk, and get notifications on your wrist. At worst, it will provide very wrong health information, feeding in very inaccurate heart rate and step count data. The old adage that you get what you pay for isn’t always true in tech, but it sure is here.
Unfortunately, those hoping to discover an opponent’s hidden gem will be disappointed. Better to wait, save another $40, and choose the Huawei Band 7 or another similarly cheap fitness tracker, as long as it’s better than this one.
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