ZTE Red Magic Watch Guide

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The Red Magic Watch has a fairly good-looking design and a user interface that’s one of the best we’ve seen in a smartwatch, as well as a battery life that keeps it ticking nearly two weeks. None of that is nearly enough to compensate for the awful fitness features though, with GPS that’s completely wrong and information that’s presented confusingly.

When ZTE’s Red Magic gaming sub-brand announced its first smartwatch, we were skeptical; when we opened the box and saw the smartwatch, we were impressed, but after using the thing… well, you’ve already scrolled past that score.

The Red Magic Watch doesn’t do anything to justify itself as a ‘gaming’ watch, which makes it odd that ZTE opted to release it under its Red Magic gaming brand (instead of just launching it as a ZTE or Nubia Watch, as with its other wearables).

Instead of looking at this like a wrist-mounted gaming device, then, it’s best just to view it as a low-cost Chinese smartwatch made by a phone company, and it’s far from the first such device. We’ve got the Xiaomi Mi Watch, Realme Watch, OnePlus Watch, Oppo Watch, Honor Magic line, and so on - these devices aren’t there to compete with your Apple, Samsung or Huawei watches, but to give you a low-cost wrist-mounted complement to your pocket device.

The Red Magic Watch puts its strengths up front: it’s pretty good-looking as low-cost smartwatches go, with a slim bezel and a fairly minimal design, but it’s in the user interface department where the wearable really shines.

Compared to most other smartwatches on the market, the Red Magic Watch UI is bright and bold, with attractive menus, plentiful color and imaginative ways to present information. Scrolling through the watch’s menus felt just a little bit more enjoyable thanks to the design.

Oh, and since we’re front-loading the compliments, it’s got a decent battery life at two weeks, which will easily outlast your Apple Watch or Wear OS device. It’s also very affordable, undercutting most of the other entries in the ‘phone-company-budget-watch’ niche, which is possibly why you’re checking it out in the first place.

A low cost isn’t always a good thing though, and in the Red Magic Watch, its main function is to help us segue into our round-up of the device’s negatives. And there are quite a few.

Our main concern is that, while the Red Magic Watch has built-in GPS, it’s dramatically - dare we say, comically - wrong. The companion app consistently showed our workout route to be roughly 10 miles off where it actually was - and that’s when it decided to record location at all. On the topic of the app, it doesn’t show all your data from exercise including, inexplicably, the timing of the workout.

While we complimented the watch’s user interface, it is full of typos, and the app is too - this device needed a once-over for its language localization. There are also inconsistencies between how data is presented in the app and UI, like with distance being shown in meters in the app and rounded to kilometers on the watch.

This kind of thing isn’t bad, per se, it’s just inoffensively weird. ZTE’s wearables have a history of buggy software, and this is just another example.

But we did encounter one bug which wasn’t just bad, but catastrophic - part way through our testing of the Red Magic Watch it inexplicably crashed, wiping all our data on the watch in the process. This was incredibly frustrating, as you can well imagine, and soured our thoughts on the device.

So it’s not a good run for the Red Magic Watch, but the most damning evidence of its failings is how relieved we were to take it off at the end of our review period, and start using a smartwatch that would track our workouts with a degree of accuracy (and not crash at random).

Download ZTE Red Magic Watch Guide now