Timex has a new smartwatch that tracks fitness and GPS for a maximum 25-day battery life – and all at a third the cost of a new Apple Watch 5.
The Timex Ironman R300 GPS is now available to buy on Timex’s website for $120 (around 93 / AU$182), tracks sleep and workouts for the better part of a month before recharging. Of course, precise location monitoring will swiftly drain its battery – if you keep GPS on constantly, the R300 will deplete its capacity in 20 hours.
While the R300 doesn’t have many bells and whistles, it packs features expected of a fitness-oriented smartwatch: guided workouts, an optical sensor for continuous heart rate tracking, and water resistance down to 30m. All in a package that looks, well, a lot like a Timex watch from the brand’s digital watch primacy. But the R300 has something its predecessors do not: a full-color smartwatch display at a bit extra cost.
Ironman R300 brings the 'smart' back in Timex smartwatch
While you don’t need a full-color display for a wearable to count as a ‘smartwatch’ - see the Withings ScanWatch, for instance - the R300’s screen is a step toward modern fitness watches. Timex has been pretty conservative in its design, releasing its first fitness smartwatch in 2014 and retaining the thick-bezeled, big-buttoned look of old digital watches, so the R300 modernizes functionality without abandoning its signature look.
That said, the R300 doesn’t look to have nearly the feature set of leading all-around smartwatches like the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2, for instance, but it allows a lot more interactivity than the simple digital displays on prior Timex trackers. And like Withings watches, the fitness and sleep data tracked by the R300 can be seen on a smartphone via a paired app.
Via The Verge
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