Realme Watch S

The Realme Watch S's lightweight was the first thing we noticed. It's a little heavier than its predecessor, weighing 48 grams, but it's still very comfortable on your wrist and you'll forget it's there after a few hours. The round watch casing and tachymeter give the timepiece a more traditional appearance that blends in with any style. The thick bezel from the Realme Watch has shrunk and is now uniform across the entire panel, and there's no sign of a large chin this time around.

The display is a 1.3-inch IPS LCD with a 360 x 360-pixel resolution and automatic brightness adjustment. Viewing angles were adequate indoors, but there is a noticeable difference when you step outside. The addition of an auto-brightness sensor did help with brightness consistency, which was a nice improvement over the Realme Watch, which only had manual brightness controls. Touch responsiveness is adequate, though I did experience some unregistered taps during my day-to-day testing.

The 1.3-inch LCD on the Realme Watch S offers a decent size for all the content supported by the device. While not class-leading, the 360 x 360-pixel resolution is more than enough to display sharp text for notifications and all apps throughout the interface. Realme claims the Watch S can crank out 600 nits of peak brightness.

Under direct light, you'll notice a tiny round sensor near the tachymeter's topmost dial for the new photosensitive sensor. This new feature allows the Watch S to adjust brightness levels on the fly, which is a significant improvement over its predecessor. We left the brightness on auto throughout my review period and had no problems. You can also manually adjust the brightness between 5 levels.

The Realme Watch S's navigation is fluid and responsive. You can move around by swiping or using the two side buttons. Both can bring the screen back to life after it has been turned off. The bottom one serves as a shortcut to the activity tracking app, while the top one functions as a back button as well as a shortcut to the app drawer. Overall, the Watch S interface was solid, and everything worked as expected. We did not encounter any hiccups or slowdowns. A swipe from the top displays your notifications, a swipe to the right brings you to the quick toggles menu, and a swipe to the left displays the weather, sleep data, and daily exercise statistics.

Source: Realme Watch S

Because the blood oxygen level meter (aka SpO2) does not take automatic readings, you must go to the dedicated app on the watch each time. For what it's worth, Realme recommends that you don't use the readings to make a diagnosis or treat yourself. We received consistent 97 percent measurements in my readings, which is comparable to other smartwatches I've tested. 

On both the watch and the Link phone app, sleep tracking provides data on Deep, Light, and REM sleep, as well as time spent awake. The phone app also provides a visually appealing representation of your sleep metrics, including color-coded graphs and sleep HR readings. So far, so good, but the actual sleep tracking method is severely flawed in detecting when you fall asleep, severely jeopardizing the results.