There are a lot of options while shopping for smartwatches and fitness tracker now that there's a demand for it. While Apple is dominating the premium smartwatch segment with its Apple Watch series, the affordable space is left for the rest of the brands to share. Xiaomi is doing an excellent job there with its Mi Bands and Lenovo is trying to keep up with its offerings.
Lenovo Carme smartwatch is the company's recent offering in the smartwatch space, boosting competition in the wearables segment in India. Banking heavily on the affordability factor, Lenovo Carme smartwatch offers some interesting features that look impressive on paper.
Launched at Rs 3,499, you can grab Lenovo Carme for as low as Rs 2,999 on Flipkart.
We had the chance to test Lenovo's Carme HW25P smartwatch and here's what we think of it.
The good
Lenovo Carme does a good job at the design. It's light, so light that you won't feel it on your wrist. The square-shaped dial is pretty standard and the rubber strap feels comfortable and is just as durable. The metal structure on the dial gives a premium touch to the Carme and it comes in all-black or green colours to match your needs. The curved surface to the display is a nice touch to the overall form factor.
I liked that the Carme offers IP68 rating at its price point, which is quite useful. I didn't have to worry about the watch in the rain or even in the pool. The colour LCD display shows all the information, has two physical buttons to select (top) and go back, home or lock/unlock screen (bottom one). The UI is very simple and doesn't require you to go through a handbook or a guide. In fact, pairing the watch with the phone is as simple as it gets.
Lenovo Carme allowed me to select different activity profiles such as walking, skipping, football, running, etc. The smartwatch shows how many calories you burnt, and also has continuous heart-rate tracking.
Lenovo Carme pairs with an app, Lenovo Life, to show all the statistics. It's pretty straight forward, but I for some reason it asks you for your profession and doesn't really give any suggestions using that information.
Finally, the battery seems to be among the better things Carme offers. With a promised battery life of up to 7 days, I could get up to 5 days without continuous heart-rate monitoring and 4 days with it. It can pair with both Android and iOS devices.
The bad
Lenovo Carme does fall short on certain parameters. For instance, the single touch display, which only goes forward and if you miss a menu, you'll have to go through all the options over again. This can be annoying at times.
The steps tracking was not as accurate as verbal counting. But my biggest problem was with the manual heart rate monitoring. It worked rarely and for some reason, I wouldn't get a reading on the watch or on the app. This is one parameter that failed miserably in my use case.
The limited number of watch faces is also somewhat disappointing as fitness trackers from Xiaomi have far more options. I liked the 3rd watch face, which had a regular dial, but you can always choose the first two watch faces to show you more statistics on the home screen.
The gesture to wake the screen never worked. So, every time I ended up using the physical button to check for time or steps. Also, the display could've been brighter as I had a hard time navigating the menus under direct sunlight.
Final thoughts
If you're considering Lenovo Carme for the way it looks, you won't be disappointed. It's one of the better-looking ones out there. It gets most of the basic fitness tracking functions right and the battery is pretty good. But you'll be able to save a few bucks going with the Mi Band 4, which has all the same features that work better in some cases and a far better battery life if you don't mind fitness band look.
Lenovo Carme is basically a fitness tracker disguised as a smartwatch. The lack of OLED display and watch faces can put off many, even at its affordable price point.
