Smart watch BlitzWolf BW-GTC we were fascinated at first sight. In terms of price, they belong to the category of the cheaper ones, but functionally, several times more expensive models will also compromise. Here you will find blood pressure measurement, blood oxygen saturation or even a built-in speaker and microphone, so with this watch you can also make phone calls without having to take your cell phone out of your pocket.
Where to buy BlitzWolf BW-GTC
We ordered the BlitzWolf BW-GTC smart watch for review from an international retailer Banggood. Thanks to the well-known EU postage Priority Line we did not pay any additional delivery fees.
BlitzWolf BW-GTC smart watch
Package content and processing quality
The BlitzWolf BW-GTC watch arrived in a white, flat box with green elements and the brand logo. Inside, there is the watch body itself in a soft foam reinforcement, a charger and a silicone strap. The charger is strange at first glance. We will discuss it in the chapter on watch life and charging.
The silicone strap is 20 mm thick and easily attaches to the watch body. You can easily replace it with any other with the same width. The one in the package is a classic, basic, black strap. Dust sticks to it and after a week of testing it shows signs of use.
However, the overall processing is good, the watch is light and strong at the same time. They have one physical button on the right side that turns the watch on or off. On the other side of the watch is a fairly large hole that looks like a slot for SIM card, but the speaker and microphone are hidden here.
BlitzWolf BW-GTC: Display and its quality
As with other smart watches in a similar price range, the manufacturer has reached for a cheaper TFT display. Its size is 1.54 ″ and the resolution is 240 x 240 px. This is a standard TFT display.
Most of the time you can clearly see the boundaries between the display and the watch frame around it. Since we don't have AMOLED here, the display is dark gray rather than black. Sometimes it shows a fine raster and especially the font is not quite fine. Brightness is sufficient, but you won't find automatic brightness adjustment here.
First turn on and pair with the application
The BlitzWolf BW-GTC watch works with the Da Fit application, which is available for both Android and iOS. The watch does not display any QR code after the first switch-on, as we are used to from other watches, but you immediately see a preset dial, which is very elegant.
Pairing with the application is extremely fast and easy. Just register in the app, fill in basic information about yourself such as gender, date of birth, height, weight and the app is ready to add a watch. At the time of writing the review can recognize only 2 watch models, i11 and BW-GTC. After clicking on the BW-GTC, the watch was immediately paired with the application. There was no need for confirmation on the watch display or scanning of the QR code.
Watch menu and functions
The main menu of the BlitzWolf BW-GTC smart watch is displayed by dragging the display to the right. The menu is colorful and consists of 12 square icons, displayed in a grid without a description. Most of these symbols in the menu are unambiguous, but not all. For example, such a number of steps icon resembles a barbell rather than a track. Similarly, the pressure measurement symbol looks like a thermometer, and the leaf symbol that shows the measurement of oxygen oxygen saturation may also not be clear to everyone at first glance.
All menu items are also accessible by switching between screens left, down or up. This will also take you to, for example, the quick access screen, where you will find the brightness setting, vibration on / off, silent mode, weather display and settings. The bottom-up screen that appears notifies you from apps.
The menu itself is very smooth, clear and apart from the mentioned symbols in the main menu, we have no reservations.
Telephony settings
Perhaps the most interesting feature that you will not normally find even in a much more expensive watch is the ability to make a voice call. As we mentioned in the introduction, there is a speaker and a microphone on the side of the watch. So how does it work? Is such watch telephony usable? Surprisingly yes.
This feature is initially disabled. It is activated when selecting a call item from the watch menu by clicking on "Turn on". Unfortunately, it didn't work for us for the first time, so all expectations about making phone calls through cheap watches vanished. The watch kept telling us that a pairing was needed for the phone call, but we did it.
We received notifications from various applications, so the watch was connected to a smartphone. After a while, a window suddenly popped up on our smartphone, in which the watch tried to connect to the phone as a multimedia device via Bluetooth. That was the solution to our problem.
The BlitzWolf BW-GTC smart watch looks similar to a Bluetooth speaker or wireless headphones for a smartphone. It is not enough to add the watch to the application, but it is also necessary to add it to the paired Bbluetooth devices for calls and sounds. If you do not want to use the phone function, just cancel the connection in the Bluetooth settings on the smartphone.
Call via BlitzWolf BW-GTC watch
A call menu with three items is available on the watch display: recent calls, dialer and contacts. Choosing contacts doesn't mean you can find your contacts here from your phone. If you want to see phone numbers for some people here, you have to manually add them to your Da Fit favorites. The maximum number is 8 contacts.
You can dial the number using the numeric keypad or through the contacts you have added in the application. The call will then start on your smartphone as well. To our surprise, information about who is calling does not appear on the smartphone of the called party. NamiIn addition, "unknown number" is always displayed. We haven't figured out why this is happening.
But the phone itself works great. The sound from the speaker is clear and the volume can be adjusted directly through the watch. We didn't notice poor sound even at the highest volume. The microphone is a bit weaker and the called party heard us a little fainter, but the overall impression was very good. Such telephony is thus perfectly usable.
Since we had the watch paired with the phone as a device for calls and sounds, it means that all the sounds from the smartphone were played through the watch, which is a slight negative. It is ideal to cancel the use of the watch as a connected bluetooth device after each call, even if it is impractical.
Huge number of dials and watch settings
Most smart watches offer a few different designs for the dial. With such a cheap watch, it is usually up to 10, maximum 20 dials. At best, you can create the dial yourself, but there is usually only the option of choosing your own background and a very limited number of font styles.
But the BlitzWolf BW-GTC smart watch offers, at the time of writing reviews, exactly 241 dials directly in the official application, which is an incredible amount. So everyone can choose. The best part is that the designs for the application are constantly increasing.
In addition to the dials, there are several other options in the application. You can turn on notifications, set an alarm, launch the camera application, customize your favorite phone contacts, update firmware, or go to other settings. In these you will find, for example: the function of searching for the watch, which only lights up the display of the watch, which will not help you much if you do not know where you set the watch.
There is also setting the time format, units, setting the automatic silent mode at selected times, turning on the continuous heart rate measurement and reset. In addition, you can turn on a drinking mode reminder, where you set how often the reminder should be displayed, how many reminders you want and when they should start to be displayed.
Last but not least, there is something for ladies - a reminder of the menstrual cycle with relatively detailed settings.
Heart rate, pressure and SpO2 measurement with BlitzWolf BW-GTC
One of the common functions of a smart watch is heart rate measurement. The BlitzWolf BW-GTC watch takes approximately 10 seconds to measure. In the watch menu you can then see all the measured values for the current day in the graph. But it lacks a scale, so you don't actually read anything from the graph. You only see the time when the measurement was taken, but you don't know what its value was. You have to check that on your smartphone.
The oxygen saturation in the blood is given as a percentage and it also takes about as long to measure as it was for heart rate measurements. You can see the last 7 measurements in the graph, which also lacks the scale.
We were mainly curious about measuring pressure and its accuracy. We did not have high expectations, but we compared the measurement with a classic pressure gauge with a shoulder cuff. We measured the pressure simultaneously on the same hand, first in peace. These were the results together with the heart rate measurements:
| BlitzWolf BW-GTC watch | Omron M3 pressure gauge | |
|---|---|---|
1. measurement |
114/71 mmHg at 70 bpm | 120/83 mmHg at 71 bpm |
| 2. measurement | 116/72 mmHg at 66 bpm | 118/75 mmHg at 66 bpm |
| 3 measurements | 111/69 mmHg at 57 bpm | 113/73 mmHg at 64 bpm |
We made further measurements after a short run before each of the three measurements, to see if the values change after exercise.
| BlitzWolf BW-GTC watch | Omron M3 pressure gauge | |
|---|---|---|
1. measurement |
137/81 mmHg at 72 bpm | 145/76 mmHg at 90 bpm |
| 2. measurement | 140/78 mmHg at 71 bpm | 130/71 mmHg at 74 bpm |
| 3 measurements | 109/68 mmHg at 74 bpm | 134/74 mmHg at 64 bpm |
As you can see, the values are not very different, especially in peace. During the load, inaccuracies of measurements over the watch were already manifested. Even here, however, the scale is missing in the graph of historical values, so you can't read the previous values from the watch, even though you see them in the graph. We believe that this will be fixed in some update, as these graphs have no meaning in this way.
Measurement of sleep duration
One of the other common functions is to monitor the length and quality of sleep. As in some other reviews, this time we slept one night with two watches on hand, namely Imilab KW66 and BlitzWolf BW-GTC.
We went to bed around 22:45 and woke up at 6:00 in the morning, but we were still in bed for a few minutes. The watch from the BlitzWolf brand recorded a sleep with a total length of 6 hours 36 m, starting at 23:39 and ending at 6:15. There was a hard sleep of 1h 14m and a light sleep of 4h 34m. This watch also displays the so-called rapid eye movement, translated as fast eye movement, lasting 48 m.
In contrast, the Imilab KW66 watch measured significantly different values. The total length of sleep was 7h 34m starting at 22:39 and ending at 6:13. Of this, hard sleep was 5h 21m, light sleep 2h 11m and waking 2m.
The result of a watch from the BlitzWolf brand looks more accurate, as we did not fall asleep immediately after we went to bed.
Application and notifications
The Da Fit application deserves praise from us. Despite the average rating in the Google Play store, we had absolutely no problem with it. In addition, it is very clear and shows a number of interesting statistics. Right on the home screen, daily statistics from steps, distance traveled, sleep duration, heart rate, pressure, blood oxygen saturation and sports activities are displayed.
Each function is clearly and color separated. Weekly or monthly reports are also available. Also interesting are statistics that compare us with other users of the application. For example, you can find out what percentage of people go through more steps a day than you, what percentage sleeps longer, goes to bed sooner or later, and so on.
For notifications to work, you must grant the Da Fit application the necessary permissions on your smartphone. Then all you have to do is choose which applications you want to receive notifications from. The list includes applications such as Phone, Messages, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Skype or Instagram. A special solution is to include all other applications under "Others", as this will turn on notifications for all other applications that are not in the list.
The alerts worked properly, and we finally didn't get the annoying notifications about Messenger's active platoon headers, as is the case with many cheap watches. We praise the possibility of reading even longer messages in the watch, as many watches display only a short part of the longer message and we have to read the rest on the smartphone. Messages are displayed, including accents.
Tracking sports activities
There are 8 sports to choose from, namely: walking, running, cycling, skipping, badminton, basketball, football and swimming. Individual sports are represented by symbols, similar to the main menu of the watch.
For comparison, we went for a walk with a pair of watches on hand, Imilab KW66 and BlitzWolf BW-GTC. After the activity, we compared the measured values, which were as follows:
| BlitzWolf BW-GTC | Imilab KW66 | |
|---|---|---|
Number of steps |
4332 | 4316 |
| distance | 3.2 km | 3.28 km |
| Calories burned | 211 | 145 |
Average heart rate |
97 | 100 |
Time |
15.6 min / km | 15.46 min / km |
Except for the calories burned, the observed values were almost identical. When the activity is finished, a short summary is displayed on the watch and more detailed information in the application. Since the watch measures the heart rate every minute during the running activity, you will find these values in the graph in the application.
Endurance and charging
The BlitzWolf BW-GTC watch comes with a very special charger in the form of a pin. This needs to be placed exactly on the charging pins on the bottom of the watch, which is very impractical. On the other hand, it does not happen that we disconnect the charger when tripping over the cable. Even so, we prefer magnetic chargers.
We had constant heart rate measurement turned on, the watch was connected to the phone as a multimedia device via Bluetooth, so we managed to discharge it in a single day. We therefore recommend that you remove the watch from among the bluetooth voice devices of the phone when the call is not used via the watch. If we did, the stamina increased to 5 days. Charging from 10% to 100% took 2 hours and 15 minutes.
BlitzWolf BW-GTC: Final Evaluation
The BlitzWolf BW-GTC is a really bloated watch that offers a lot of features that often don't even come with a $100 watch € and more. Here you will find heart rate measurement, sleep and activity monitoring, blood pressure measurement and blood oxygen saturation.
Buy BlitzWolf BW-GTC at the best price
With the watch, you can even make a full phone call without any problems. The only reservations we have about the impossibility of turning off the display light function after raising your hand, which causes the display to light up even during night sleep. We also lacked the ability to set how many seconds the display should remain active after it lights up. Nevertheless, it is clearly the best cheap smart watch we have ever had the opportunity to try. It is unbelievable that you can buy a watch with so many functions for less than 30 EUR.
I have them and I fully agree, the price is completely ridiculous in relation to the features, I am extremely satisfied with them and I definitely recommend it.