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Fitness
- Limited fitness features as it only tracks your step count
- There's no heart rate tracker or GPS here
As it’s a hybrid watch, Kronaby has included a couple of different fitness features in here to try and ensure you don’t have to wear a fitness tracker on your other wrist. That said, there’s not much here that’s going to get you particularly fit.
There’s no heart rate tracker, GPS or top-end features you’d expect on products like the Samsung Gear Sport or Apple Watch 3.
In fact, the Kronaby just tracks your daily step count. If you find the watch comfortable enough to wear jogging, it’ll record your step count when you're pounding the pavement but there’s no breakdown of data to show you the distance you’ve covered or where you can improve.
This is more just a simple pedometer, designed to give you a look at how many steps you’ve got left to take on the way to your daily goal. If you set up the sub dial on the watch to your step count it’ll give you a percentage on how close you are to hitting your goal, which you can set within the app.
If you walk a lot and you want your goal to be 15,000 steps a day, you can set that up and when it points on the watch to 50% you’ll know you’ve walked 7,500 steps in that day.
It's nice not being limited to the standard 10,000 steps, and we did find it to be as accurate as other hybrid watches for monitoring our daily steps.
There’s no sleep tracking here, and that’s probably a good thing as the Kronaby isn’t the kind of device you really want to wear to bed. It’s not comfortable for wearing when you’re trying to sleep, so you’ll need to get a separate sleep tracker to get data on your naps.
Basically the Kronaby is a step tracker and that’s just an added bonus here rather than it being the main focus of the watch. This is much more about fashion and style rather than encouraging you to get up off the sofa and into your trainers.
Battery life
- The battery on the Kronaby watch will last you up to two years
- May be shorter if you get lots of notifications, but uses watch battery
If you’ve used a smartwatch before, you’ll likely know how frustrating it can be to have to remember to charge up your watch alongside your phone every night. That’s not the case here with the Kronaby hybrid watch.
Like a lot of hybrid watches you can buy right now, it features a long-life battery inside. The Kronaby's battery can last up to two years depending on how you use it.
If you’re getting notifications throughout the day regularly, it’s likely you’ll find the battery life will be a bit shorter than that estimate but we can’t imagine the battery would need replacing within the first year of use.
Some hybrid watches and fitness trackers with replaceable batteries only last six months, so this is impressive.
Perhaps the only annoyance with the battery here is you’ll need to take this to a jewellers to replace the battery inside. That won’t be expensive though, so it’s perfect if you’re looking for a watch with a long life.
Interface and app
- You interact with the two buttons and crown on the side of the watch
- App will work with iPhone and Android devices to setup your watch
You can download the app for your iPhone or Android handset then connect up your watch quite easily. Your phone will need to be running iOS 9 or Android 5 software or above to be able to connect up to the watch.
The app is how you can ensure the time is accurate, look at your step count and setup the connected functionality of the watch. You can decide what you want the sub dial to show you or the three buttons on the right hand side of the watch to be able to do.
Under the term ‘Watch Face’ you’ll be able to change what happens when you press the main crown button. Your options are you can display your step count, the date, a second time zone, the timer or a stopwatch.
Once you’ve put this in place within the app, you can then use the feature whenever you press the main crown button on your watch. For example, if you want to see your step count you'll press down the crown and it’ll display the steps you’ve done with the two hands pointing to signify them.
You can also decide in here what you want the smaller sub dial to show at all times, but you only have the choice of a second timezone or the daily step count so there’s not much personalization here.
This all works really well and the watch reacts quickly, but you'll have to remember what functionality you've set up here. If you often change what each button does, you may find yourself getting a little confused.
Next up is notifications, where you decide what you want vibrations from the watch to mean.
There are lots of choices here with either one, two or three buzzes as your main options. You can put here that you want all calls to vibrate three times, or you can add specific people so your loved ones give you different vibrations and you know it’s an urgent call that you need to pick up.
As well as calls, you can add in texts, calendar notifications, alarms, step goals and more here too. The vibrations themselves are quite strong so you won't miss phone calls or other notifications when it's on your wrist, but the watch won't make a noise.
Then the last thing you can personalize is what you want the two pusher buttons below and above the crown to be able to do. Here you can add features such as find my phone (where you can set off an alarm on your device for when you’ve lost it) or music control, so you can pause your tracks by pressing one button on your wrist.
Other options include a way to boot up the camera quickly, remember a spot (for when you’ve parked your car), a way to walk you home or even integration with IFTTT.
We’ve not yet been able to experiment with the IFTTT functionality, but our understanding is you can set up a recipe so you press a button and you can have some smart home features work.
For example, you can press the button when you get home to turn on your lights with a suitable recipe within the app.
The functionality here is good for a hybrid, with lots more options than your average hybrid watch. Being able to control your music is interesting enough, but the integration with IFTTT adds a whole lot more versatility.
