My first smartwatch was a Fitbit Charge 3 which I purchased towards the end of 2018. I was quite happy with Fitbit and upgraded to various models until the company was purchased by Google (2021). It wasn’t so much that I disliked Google as that I no longer felt like the watch was meeting my needs, so I began to try other products. Over the next three years I purchased and tried smartwatches from Amazfit, Samsung, Garmin, Kaclut, LGE, and Octdg. Of these, the best (and most expensive) was Garmin, but I wound up giving that to a family member who could better use its geographic tools than I had any need for. Most of the rest were returned after a trial period.
My needs are focused on health, and for that matter, senior health given my age. And for the last two years or so, I’ve found the optimal series of watches for my needs: the brand Kospet.
The most recent entry in the Kospet brand line up is the Tank 2 Ultra 2.
The watch arrives well packed in an attractive box that displays various certifications such as military grade toughness and a lens made of Gorilla Glass–one of the most break and scratch resistant lenses available today.
Opening the box reveals a carefully packages watch face, well protected from shipping damage. The accessory compartment contains the watch band and charging cord.
Setting up the watch is straightforward and follows the routines found for most smartwatches on the market. After attaching the band, download the Kospet app, and then follow the app’s instructions for initializing the watch. You can make decisions at this point (changeable later) for whether to use English or metric measurements.
You can also decide whether to allow the watch to access your phone and text messages. I was initially skeptical of the wisdom of doing this as this capability for previous watches resulted in serious battery degradation, but I decided to try it with the Tank 2 Ultra 2 and was pleasantly surprised to find that it had very little impact on batter longevity. The speaker and microphone are surprisingly useful–I can hear the conversation and others can hear my replies without problem.
Some people like to have the screen flash on whenever they lift their arm, I prefer to manually activate it (with a button press), and have it set for 5 seconds duration. All this is customizable.
Health Tracking
One of the main reasons to purchase a smartwatch is because of the health tracking features most watches in this category boast. The Tank 3 Ultra 2 has a step counter which works as well or better than any of the watches I’ve owned. You can view the step count on most of the (customizable) watch faces with a press of a button, or see it displayed in the app on your phone.
The watch also tracks heart rate and blood oxygen–I’ve been able to compare these numbers to the measurements at my physician’s office and they are a close match. This watch also has a tracker for “stress,” and while there’s nothing I know of to verify its accuracy, it does seem to reflect how I feel at any given time. There is a tracker for “mood,” and like stress, it agrees with my perception of things. If you enable it, the watch will track sleep, and this I can check because I also have a sleep tracker in my bed–and the readings are extremely close. Finally (for me–I can’t comment on the menstrual cycle meter), there is a blood pressure measure. This one does not match that well to the readings in my physician’s office, but my doctor thinks that might be because of “White Coat” syndrome.
It is a user choice as to whether these measurements are made on request or continuously monitored. I was skeptical about continuous monitoring because of battery usage, but I can say after a month’s trial that if it is impacting battery performance, it’s not noticeable.
Sports Modes
The Tank 3 Ultra 2 has numerous built-in sport tracking modes. I regularly used the tracker for elliptical cycling, and as near as I can tell, it just allows you to record the amount of time you spend on the equipment.
The watch also has a geographic positioning chip, so it is possible to use it for spacial tracking. I have not tested this capability. It also has a flashlight mode similar to the flashlight app on many cell phones, and it can ring the cell phone if you can’t recall where you left it. This is not quite as good as a dedicated device like the Tile because it won’t ring the phone if you have it silenced.
Battery Performance
One of the best features of this watch is its outstanding battery performance. As I mentioned earlier, based on experience with other watches, I was reluctant to turn on some of its features, but over the month I’ve been using it, I have now enabled many of those features including using text messaging and phone capabilities. With everything I’ve enabled, the battery needs to be recharged about every three weeks. That’s an estimate, because I’ve recharged it when it fell to 50% and in the past month, I’ve recharged it twice. From the 50% level, it takes about an hour to reach 100%. No watch I’ve owned previously comes close to this mark.
One Drawback Worth Mentioning
For both the health measurements and the sports modes, there is no way to connect the watch or app to any cloud-based or other external record keeping systems. What that means is that whenever you need to do any sort of maintenance activity such as upgrading your phone or perhaps buying a new version of the watch, you lose the history of your health and sports tracking. This drawback is shared by most other small manufacturers of smartwatches and I would guess that the infrastructure required to maintain the data externally is probably expensive.
I can see three ways this can be handled. First, obviously, the vendor could create a cloud-based app. Second, if that is not economically feasible, they could partner with a health site that is not already affiliated with a smartwatch brand. Third, and probably least costly, and something that would certainly meet my own needs, they could develop an import/export function on their existing app that would allow users to back the data up, perhaps to a computer, and then restore it when the new phone or app is installed.
Customer service (which, by the way, is extremely good) has assured me that they are working on solutions.
Final Thoughts and Conclusions
Of the half-dozen smartwatches I have tested from various manufacturers, the Kospet Tank 3 Ultra 2 is the best, and by a wide margin. Excellent performance, accurate tracking of steps and health measures, and outstanding battery life, all at a price that is a fraction of many of the better known competitors.
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