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TechRadar

Matt Evans

Black Friday is a smartwatch paradise, don't get duped by one of these outrageous knock-offs

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You've all heard the phrase – if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Nowhere is this more pertinent than during the Black Friday deals you often see on smartwatches and fitness trackers on Amazon.

A quick glance at the site will yield some brilliant smartwatch savings, including some great Apple Watch Black Friday deals, Garmin Black Friday deals, and more. Yet if you accidentally stumble into the wrong part of Amazon, you might find yourself overwhelmed by incredibly cheap, stylish-looking fitness trackers that seem to offer everything an Apple Watch or Samsung Galaxy might for a fraction of the price.

Amazon (and it really is only Amazon) is absolutely littered with knock-off crap that has no business on your wrist. Weird-sounding brands like Tozo, Gydom, Bangwei, Iowdo, GEAK, FTWIN promise the earth in fitness tracking, blood oxygen monitoring, sleep tracking, sports coverage, and beyond. In reality, it's all a sham.

Many of these watches even have insane product title names that use a practice called "keyword stuffing" to try and get the products to surface when you search for a particular thing on Amazon. Instead of calling a Watch the "Timepiece fitness watch" for example, you call it (and this is a real example) the "Smart Watch for Men Women (Answer/Make Call), 2.0"Smartwatch Fitness Tracker with 100+ Sport Modes, Heart Rate/Sleep Monitor, Pedometer, SpO2, IP67 Waterproof, Activity Tracker for Android iOS Phones." Snappy.

There's a laundry list of reasons why you shouldn't buy one of these watches, questions around accuracy, data privacy, build quality, customer support, compatibility, longevity, and more abound. We should know, we've actually tried them out.

Testing cheap smartwatches so you don't have to

There are several problems with these devices. Firstly, they’re just not as good as the best fitness trackers and best smartwatches from mainstays like Google, Apple, Samsung, and more. Cheap smartwatches often cut corners, using sub-par sensors and algorithms, and that can mean inaccurate data points.

I personally tested one of these cheap smartwatches against an expensive Garmin Epix Pro, and while the smartwatch was surprisingly rich in features, I found huge differences in heart rate, running pace, distance traveled during a run, and sleep tracking.

While it did lots of things, it didn’t do any of them particularly well. I quickly came to the conclusion the smartwatch was simply too cheaply priced to invest in high-quality sensors or decent health-tracking algorithms, leading to frequent inaccuracies.

While any gadget that doesn’t operate as described ought not to be really worth your time, it’s especially dangerous when it comes to health and fitness devices: when you’re basing decisions about your personal well-being on inaccurate data. Your bad watch might trick you into believing you burned more calories than you really did, or flag up heart rate issues that don’t actually exist.

Another issue is around health data privacy. While companies like Apple, Samsung, and Google have easily accessible privacy policies and some guarantee of data encryption (even if Fitbit and Google’s privacy issues could use some work), giving your data over to cheap, no-name branded smartwatches means allowing an unknown company to have unfettered access to your personal health, sleep, and wellness data, your contacts, messages and more.

Even if your budget is on the smaller side, it’s better to get a device from a tried-and-trusted brand. We can recommend the Fitbit Luxe, Fitbit Inspire 2, or Garmin Forerunner 55.

So where should you look this Black Friday? Here are a few good cheap smartwatches and fitness trackers that you should actually consider if you want to save a bit of money and improve your overall health and fitness.