Radley Smart Watch RYS07-2072 Honest Review

Are you looking for a new smart watch but don’t want to shell out a fortune but also want something practical and stylish? The Radley Smartwatch RYS07-2072” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>Garmin Fenix 5S (read my review of this watch here) watch and couldn’t recommend it more for someone who wanted to improve their running performance. It has led me to many a PB over the 4ish years I’ve had it and, for me, it was well worth the price tag.

I only have one issue with the My top 3 features I was looking for in a smart watch:-

I know that the Samsung and Apple watches are all the trend at the moment but, to me, they all still looked like smartwatches (not to mention the battery life of the Apple watch was not something I was willing to compromise on!).

After pouring over reviews and what felt like a neverending list of watches, I stumbled upon the Radley ranges. Upon first glance, I thought they were the perfect watches for me. They looked good and they each had a ton of features but ultimately it was the watch face display and the pretty straps that made me settle upon the What I liked about the Radley Smart watch

It looks good

It definitely ticks the boxes for ‘looks more like an everyday watch’ than a smart watch and it looks feminine enough to pass for a special occasion.

There are also quite a few different watch faces, or you can upload one of your own, which all looked pretty.

The straps are interchangeable and this model in particular gives you the option of black or cream, they were also very easy to change.

Features

Has all the features you’d expect such as sleep, steps tracker with a couple of additional features like a camera button which allows you to essentially take pictures via your watch when linked to your phone as well as ‘find my phone’ which I need to use more often than I’m willing to admit!

Lots of activities to choose from like walking, running, hiking and yoga

Radley app is appealing and easy to navigate

The data and screens on the app look really clean and easy to read and finding all of your stats is a breeze. You can set daily step / distance/ calorie / sleep goals and it will track all of these.

What I didn’t like as much about the Radley Smart watch

Comfort

This watch was really uncomfortable to wear for extended periods of time. With the Fenix watch, I’ll typically wear it all day / night until I need to charge it but with the Radley, the chunky strap holder would dig into my wrist (I also like to have a little bit of slack in my watches so it wasn’t tight).

Clunky touchscreen

The display didn’t seem to be sensitive enough to come on and at times I was jiggling my wrist around to try and get the display showing (you can touch the screen but hey, I’m lazy and want to move my wrist instead!).

Scrolling through the touchscreen menus was very frustrating. It either would freeze or you’d end up scrolling and scrolling with no end in sight against your will. It was like trying to thread a needle and I got fed up with trying to click on the app I wanted because the watch just didn’t seem to want me to do it!

Battery life

I suppose in comparison to the Apple Watch, this is probably about the same in terms of battery life throughout a normal day of use. I was using it to do one 30-minute walk in the morning and usual watch use throughout the day (receiving notifications etc).

I would fully charge the battery every morning before my walk and it would usually deplete the battery to around 50% meaning I felt like it needed another charge once I was home to get me through the day.

Not only was the battery life terrible, but the magnetic charging cable was also a nightmare to connect to the watch. If you tilted it to the northwest and at 28 degrees it would charge (I’m kidding), otherwise it would just flick off the connectors. Please Radley, I just want to charge the darn thing!

App and pairing with others

As I’ve mentioned above, I actually quite liked the app but one drawback was that I couldn’t seem to get a map of the route to show. Whether it was never tracking the GPS fully or it just didn’t think you’d need it, I’m not sure but I like to see where I’ve been.

I also couldn’t connect to the Strava app, in comparison to Garmin it would upload at the same time once the activity had finished, so I didn’t feel like I had a comprehensive place for all of my workouts and would add them in later.

I also tried to connect via Apple Health to retrieve the data but that didn’t seem to work either, and it wasn’t from lack of trying.

The watch also didn’t appear to stay connected after some time to features like the weather app but appeared to be connected otherwise. I’d have to go onto the Radley app every time to connect it and eventually it would appear but in fairness, I could just look on my phone instead of connecting every time.