So, it’s December 28th, you unpacked your sparkly new Kingwear GT88 smart watch (also branded as MindKoo and others) some 3 days ago, and you’re starting to think it might be a piece of crap. Perhaps you should be thinking about sending it back?…

Or not. It might just be a bit of a sod to setup.

This is the post I needed when I first got this device. Internally the device seems to be made by some people called Mediatek who then pass it to third parties to rebadge it.

The first thing I would do, is take the instructions and put them in the bin – because they really are utter rubbish. Comedy reading maybe but not actually helpful and completely fail to mention most of the things you need to do.

The next thing you need to know – is that the software you are told to install is not the software you need to make it work.

Start off by bluetooth pairing the watch with your phone. If you don’t know how to do this, go google it – life’s too short to type those instructions up.

That said, there is a crucial point here. Once you have Bluetooth paired the watch, you should tap on the cog to edit its settings on the phone. Within, you will find a setting that shares contacts, make sure this is ticked as it is not by default. Without this you will find that the watch is unable to access your phone’s contacts or the call history which severely limits it’s usefulness.

So what do I think of this device?

Hardware

I got the gold one – and I have to say it looks rather nice, it’s not heavy, the screen is good and the watch strap kind of matches. The built in camera is camouflaged as an old fashioned winder which is kind of neat. All in all it looks good. The problem is that it’s about 20% too big, particularly the thickness. It just needs to be that bit smaller.

Next question – why the arse have they put a camera on it? Have they even tried to use it? Unsurprisingly the pictures are uncompromisingly crap. Very low res and indoors, with a corking orange colour cast. Pointless. Maybe it was just cos they could. Who knows.

Charging is done via a proprietary magnetic connector with four connectors. The magnets are a little bit weak which makes it a little fiddly but it kind of does the job.

Battery life, seems to be around 36 hours when new. Nowhere near as good as a fitbit but better than many other smart watches, so not terrible.

It’s actually possible to open up the watch and put a SIM inside it with it’s own telephone number and so on. I’ve got to ask, what’s the point? I’m not sure I need my wrist to have a different telephone number to my inside pocket, the two are usually quite close to each other – and the idea that my Mum is going to stop off to wonder which she’s going to dial up seems implausible. Maybe the idea is that you could use it instead of having a phone. Err. No. I don’t think so. No. Happily the SIM is not mandatory and you can just use the watch as an extension of your phone which makes a lot more sense.

Software

You can use the Fundo Smart Device app to install additional apps to the smart watch. At the time of writing this includes a Yahoo Weather app and a bunch of watch faces. I think that’s about it – in addition to the preinstalled apps.

So lets go through the apps. For reference my phone is an HTCH M9+ running Android 6.0

Contacts:
– Lists all the contacts in your phone. If you tap on one, you can use your phone to dial or message them. Works well enough. NB: This will not work if you haven’t set the Bluetooth settings for the smart watch on your phone, to share contacts.

Call Logs:
– Shows call logs.

Calendar:
– Just seems to show a calendar (ie: the day and date), but doesn’t seem to show any events from the phone. Currently a fail.

Dialler:
– Allows you to type a number and it will dial it. If you want to dial a contact, use the contacts area instead. Will talk a bit more about using the phone later on.

Calculator:
– Yay! It’s a simple calculator – and it works!!

SMS:
– Displays SMS messages from your phone. This totally works – you can read them and write them (allbeit only in caps).

QR Code Display:
– To take your phone to the “Fundo Wear” app – shame it doesn’t take you to the more useful “Fundo Smart Device” app – as otherwise, it’s a pretty good idea.

Bluetooth Setup:
– For setting up bluetooth.

Music Player:
– Allows you to control the music player on your phone. Works well you. You can go forward or back through the current list, read the track name being played, change the volume and pause. It also works to a degree with other player apps such as the BBC radio app. If you don’t have headphones plugged into your phone – the sound will come out of your watch. If you do have headphones – it comes out of them instead, so great for out running / walking to work etc…

Some sort of internal Player for Video:
– Have yet to have need of this.

Theme Changer:
– Allows you to switch between a number of simple display themes.

Camcorder:
– Will record video to an internal SD card or the phone. Haven’t really used it.

Camera:
– Will take pictures to the watch memory. Low quality camera that you have to aim like James Bond in Moonraker from the wrist (whilst unable to see the screen). Daft. Why?

Voice Recorder:
– Allows you to make recording to the watch memory with a natty little control ui. Will probably make you feel just like “Secret Squirrel” and all very covert. Fun if you’re in to that sort of thing.

Settings:
– Pretty important for setting the watch up. Most of this is straightforward haven’t yet investigated “Magic Voice” though!

Notifications:
– Displays notifications sent from the phone app. You can tune which phone apps are allowed to send notifications from the phone app to limit these to those that are interesting. It actually works pretty well allowing you to read emails and SMS as well.

Sleep Monitor:
– unlike a FitBit, this isn’t always on – you have to start it up. I haven’t tried this, so I’ll revise this section when I’ve used it.

Remote Capture:
– I think this is supposed to be used as a remote firing control for the camera on your phone. I haven’t yet got this to work. Not sure I care eithe.

File Manager:
– If I ever find a reason to store a file I need to manage on the device, I’m sure this will be very useful.

Heartmonitor:
– Measures your heartrate. You hit a start button and it measures it for about 10 seconds and then comes back with a reading. I’ve read elsewhere that this is pretty wildly inaccurate and I’d be inclined to agree.

Alarm:
– You can setup alarms local to the watch. I can see this might be useful, though I’ve yet to use it.

Stepcounter:
– Like the sleep monitor, you need to start it, which is a bit mad. Similarly, I’ve yet to use it so will report back at a later date.

Antitheft:
– Haven’t yet investigated how to use this.

Flight Mode:
– Does what it says on the tin. Turns off bluetooth I would imagine, and cellular activity if you have a SIM within.

Sedentary Reminder:
– I’ve yet to use this as yet but you can set a number of minutes after which it will prompt you to move. Presumably it can detect movement to reset the counter but I’ve not yet tried it out.

Clock Face:
– Allows you to set the look and feel of the clock face.

Information:
– Displays a screen saying “Smart Watch”. Handy. I did not know that.

Gesture Motion:
– Allows you to configure certain gestures to certain actions such as turn the screen on or answer the phone. Pretty useful. However the screen does flash on and off a lot if you’re typing and have set gesture to turn the screen on. In the end I disabled this and just use the button on the side. This gesture works a lot better on the Fitbit.

Power Saving:
– Seems to make the screen a little dimmer when switched on.

Siri Integration:
– Being on Android, I don’t have Siri. Maybe it will talk to google instead? Will have to check…

Notifications

Initially I found there were quite a lot of notifications that pop-up telling you what your phone is doing. This gets quite annoying pretty quickly. I don’t care that my phone is optimising it’s battery use – it just needs to get on and do it. The notifications area in the Fundo phone app allows you to switch off / hide the ones that aren’t relevant to you. On my HTC this mean’t switching off the one for “System UI”.

Dismissing a notification on the Smartwatch does not dismiss it on the phone so it’s a bit of a one way experience. Could be better.

Receiving Calls

When you receive an incoming call you can answer either using the watch face or the phone. You can see the number calling and if memory serves the name.

The default seems to be to route both mic and speaker through the watch rather than the phone regardless of which device you tap to answer. I would have thought that tapping the watch would use that device, whilst tapping the phone would use that device. You can use the phone to reroute the call to its own mic or speaker during the call though, easily enough. Sound quality of the watch speaker is good enough and according to people on the other end, sound quality from the watch mic is also fine.

When in the car I would like the car hands free system to take priority if it is connected. If not then the watch or the phone itself depending on which device I use to pick up the call. There is no easy way in android to do this. Bluetooth priority is simply determined by the order in the Bluetooth devices list and there is no function to reorder them. So your only option is to delete the bluetooth connections and recreate. The highest priority device is listed first.

Conclusion

Well, I’m going to have to spend some time living with it but first impressions are this:

If you don’t have access to instructions like these, the device is a disaster. However once you work out how to configure, it’s not actually that bad. But for most people this will be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Big fail by the manufacturer.

It’s kind of the opposite of Fitbit. Fitbit do good software but their devices in my view lack robustness and longevity. And they’re pricey. They measure steps etc… pretty accurately though and the battery will run for 5 days at a time which is pretty great. Boring displays though.

In contrast here, the software is average but the hardware appears more robust. It’s also much cheaper. Not sure about accuracy of measurement. Battery life around 1.5 to 2 days. Some of the displays you can install are quite nice.

Core features: Making and answering phone calls works pretty well. Reading texts and other notifications is good though dismissal of notifications doesn’t go back to the phone. Music Control is good. These are the key features it has to nail and mostly it does.

Other features are mostly irrelevant.

The main fail is the calendar – but it’s not annoying enough to make me send the phone back.

I suspect things like the step counter which are central to fitbit, will annoy if you want that sort of functionality – but it’s no biggie for me.

The device does not support Android Wear – so all the good stuff of turn by turn navigation on your wrist or slicker google integration is missing. On the other hand this device is a third of the price (or less) of an Android Wear – so you pay’s your money – you take your choice.

So… once I’d sorted out the phone software, less irritating than expected and more functional. I’ll be keeping it 🙂