#Which One Should You Buy? – Review Geek

As previously mentioned, these two watches are pretty different. Not just in hardware, though—the software is noticeably different. Both watches have nearly identical core functions and apps, but the layout is remarkably different.

To start, here’s what you get:

• Customizable watch faces
• Run tracking
• Heart rate reading
• Pulse ox reading
• Alarm
• Stopwatch
• Shortcuts
• Weather
• Menstrual tracking (44 only)

Further differences are a little more nuanced. For example, the 47 offers more watch faces to choose from, with more data options on each. But you can only load three at a time on the watch, where the 44 allows up to six. I find it hilarious that you can save fewer faces on the watch with more options. It makes no sense.

Speaking of watch faces, it’s also worth noting that neither watch has the option for an always-on display. Raise to wake works okay for the most part though, so this isn’t a huge issue.

All of the watch faces on the 44 are basically variations of each other: an image as a background and the time/date. That’s all you get. On the 47, however, there are options for faces with the step counter, calories, and even heart rate. You know, the stuff that most people would want to see on a smartwatch.

It’s also worth mentioning that what you get out of the box is what you’re stuck with—there’s no support for third-party watch faces here. There’s always a chance that Wyze could add more options in the future, but it’s no guarantee.

 A sample size of the watch faces available on each watch. Left: 44; Right: 47

So for watch face options, I definitely prefer the Watch 47.

Beyond the watch faces, however, the general interface—even down the navigation of said interface—is different.

For navigation, it goes a little something like this from the watch face:

• Swipe up: Quick settings panel—brightness, DND, settings, battery, ring phone, weather (weather is only on the 47)
• Swipe down: Notifications
• Swift left: Apps
• Swift right: Activity Data (47 only); swiping right does nothing on the 44

 Quick settings panel; Left: Wyze Watch 44; Right: Wyze Watch 47

So, right out of the gate, you’re getting a dramatically different experience from each watch. There’s no simple way to see your activity metrics (step count, etc.) on the 44—you have to swipe into the apps page and select the Activity option. The 47 has watch faces that show much of this info and a way to see more details with a quick swipe over.

So again, I prefer the 47 here.

The differences don’t stop there, either. When you swipe over to the app drawer, you’re greeted with the first thing I think the 44 does better. On the 44, you get a list of apps with names so it’s clear what each one does. On the 47, these are just icons. Some of them are clear, while others aren’t.

Oh, they’re all in a different order, too.

 App drawer; Left: Wyze Watch 44; Right: Wyze Watch 47

And when you launch those apps, the interfaces are different yet again. This is mostly just visuals, however, and the core functionality is the same. For example, the heart rate and pulse ox monitors are more cartoony and “fun” on the 47. But functionally, they do the same thing on both watches.

And that’s pretty much true across all the apps here—they look different and even include different verbiage in some cases, but the core functionality is the same. Neither is better than the other, though I do like the fact that the 44 includes app names so you know exactly what they are.

While most of the apps here are things you’d expect to see on a watch like this, there’s one that’s a little more useful for owners of other Wyze products: the Shortcuts app. This allows you to set specific actions, like turning a camera on or off, within the app and have it sync to the watch. Then, you can toggle that setting from the watch. It’s really simple and worked pretty much instantly in my testing.

You can set shortcuts to do a number of things, including activating cameras, uploading a video to the cloud, toggling motion detection, toggling notifications, and more. You can also universally mute and unmute notifications for all your Wyze products at once.

Once you get past the differences in the software, the two watches function very similarly, save for the missing menstrual feature on the 47 that I mentioned earlier. So, by and large, you get the same overall experience.

As far as smartwatches go, the Wyze Watches are pretty basic. The biggest draw of a smartwatch for most users is mirrored notifications on your wrist so you don’t have to grab your phone every time it buzzes. And for that, the Wyze Watch works beautifully … well, if you’re an Android user anyway. iOS is more limited.

Notification options on Android

With Android, you have the option to choose which notifications show up on the watch. That includes every app you have installed, so you can pick and choose. This setup takes a bit of time and is quite tedious if you have a bunch of apps, but the flexibility is great.

On iOS, it’s less inclusive. You get a list of preselected apps (that are toggled on by default), including ones that you might not even have installed. For example, the list on my iPhone 12 Mini includes WeChat, WhatsApp, and Spotify, despite the fact that I don’t have any of those installed. It was honestly jarring when I first saw it until I realized this is just a preset list.

Once you get through that list, however, there’s a simple toggle for “other applications,” which is a blanket setting for literally everything else you have installed. At that point, it’s all or nothing, which can get really annoying if you have a lot of apps installed that send frequent notifications.

This is what you get on iOS. I don’t even have a lot of those apps installed.

Alas, this is an iOS issue, not a Wyze issue. It’s a limitation in the way iOS handles notification sharing with apps and accessories, so it’s something you’d have to deal with no matter what watch you have. The exception here is of course the Apple Watch, because, you know … Apple.

It’s also worth noting that there are no reply options on either OS—not even canned responses. You can see notifications, but that’s it. Also, there’s no emoji support that I’ve seen on either watch. It just shows a blank space where an emoji should be. The same goes for MMS (picture messages), but that’s the be expected.

If you’re looking for a smartwatch to track your activities, I can tell you right now that this ain’t the one. It tracks running and that’s literally it. Unfortunately, I’m not a runner in any form (cyclist only, thanks), so I was unable to test this.

In a similar realm to activity tracking, however, the Wyze Watch features sleep tracking. This has gotten more popular over the years, with most modern high-end activity trackers offering some form of sleep tracking. I’ve been testing the Wyze Watch’s sleep tracking alongside the Garmin Venu 2 for the last few weeks, and I’ll tell you this: It’s better than nothing but not by much.

To be clear, sleep tracking is pretty dubious in the first place as far as metrics go, but I’ve been tracking mine for years and have watched it get more advanced and more accurate as devices get more modern. Most smartwatches or activity trackers monitor sleep by using various sensors–generally, heart rate, pulse ox, and the accelerometer.

Because the Wyze Watch doesn’t do constant HR tracking (you can set it to “continuous mode,” which checks your HR every five minutes) or always-on pulse ox of any kind, I can only assume it’s tracking your movements while you sleep. This is the most basic and least helpful form of sleep tracking, as it’s missing several key variables.

Here’s an example of the Wyze Watch compared to the Garmin Venu 2’s sleep tracking (which uses pulse, blood oxygen, and movement to detect sleep zones). As you can see, the Wyze Watch is about as basic as basic can be.

Left: Garmin Venu 2 sleep stats; Right: Wyze Watch (47) sleep stats. This is the same night. Also a rare “no awake time” night.

in other words, if you’re looking to the Wyze Watch to be a way to track your overall fitness, it’s only going to get the job done on a very basic level. If you’re not a runner, it has no tracking options for you, and its sleep tracking is the most basic I’ve seen in years (maybe ever?).

But hey, it’s only $20. You have to keep your expectations in check here.

Finally, I want to talk a little bit about my experience with the heart rate and pulse ox (blood oxygen) sensors. I’ve always found wrist-based heart rate sensors to be largely inaccurate most of the time on every smartwatch, but it will very much depend on your use case.

For example, in general wear, the Wyze Watch seemed to be okay—at least it was very similar to the Garmin Venu 2 (with the watches on different wrists) during my testing. Where wrist-based seems to fail me, however, is during workouts. I’m a cyclist, and I haven’t had a time when a wrist-based heart rate sensor was even remotely close to my chest strap. At the best of times, most wrist-based sensors will read 20ish BPM low, and at the worst, it won’t show an elevated heart rate at all.

This is all true for the Wyze Watch. It’s fine during casual use (just walking around, yard work, shopping, etc. You know, life stuff.) so if that’s all you’re after, it’ll do the job. And really, since it only tracks runs and doesn’t have support for external sensors, then that’s the most likely scenario anyway.

As for pulse ox tracking, it seems to be very comparable to the results I get from the Garmin Venu 2 as well. There’s little utility here since it’s doesn’t offer consistent tracking (this would be very useful for sleep tracking at the very least), but it does what it says on the box.

Lastly, let’s talk step tracking. This is another mostly dubious metric—not because it’s unimportant, but because most trackers grossly overestimate the number of steps people take in a day. Many step trackers are simply accelerometer-based, which essentially means they detect movement as steps. This means you can stand in place and wave your arms and it will detect steps, or you can leave your arm in place and walk, and they’ll detect steps.

As a result, almost every movement you make is counted as a “step.” I’ve tried a bunch of different trackers over the years and have found Garmin to offer the most accurate—it’s very selective about what is considered a “step,” which leads to fewer false positives. For example, where basically every other tracker I’ve tried detected time on the bikes as “steps,” Garmin does not.

Again, wearing both the Garmin Venu 2 and Wyze Watch (both 44 and 47 at different times), the results reflect exactly what I expected—the Wyze Watch pretty much doubles what Garmin gives me on a regular basis.

Now, does that really matter? Nah. It’s fine. Accuracy on something like this is relative—if you use the same tracker every day, that becomes your baseline metric. So if it says you walk 10,000 steps daily and then you pull out a 15k day, then you did more. That’s all that really matters when it comes to steps. (Unless you’re stupidly anal like I am and obsess over true “accuracy,” which I don’t recommend.)

One of the best things about the Wyze Watch not offering an always-on display and limited access to apps or services is the insane battery life. You can easily get a week or so out of either watch. (Wyze claims nine days for each, which is a bit more than I was able to get in testing.) You could probably eke out a bit more than a week by leaving the brightness all the way down and disabling the raise to wake feature.

But overall, only having to charge the watch once a week is pretty solid. You can go so long in between charges it’s easy to almost forget to do it altogether.

Both watches are similar in function but different in interface. One has better specs (44), while the other has a better display (47). So, which one do you choose? For me, that choice is pretty easy: I’d go with the 47.

The interface on the 47 is much better, as it offers quick access to metrics on the leftmost screen, the menu screen is more useful as it also shows weather, it has better watch faces, and the screen is bigger with less bezel. The 44 may have a more powerful processor, but as I said earlier, I haven’t noticed a single difference in performance between the two. I could only see this being an issue if third-party apps and services were supported, but because they’re not, it’s a wash.

Of course, the 47 is quite a bit bigger, but I have small wrists and it hasn’t bothered me. I’m also used to wearing large watches.

Ultimately, it’s a $20 smartwatch and it’s honestly hard to make the wrong choice here. Just remember to keep your expectations in check here—you’re not getting an Apple Watch.

But at least it tells time.

Note: At the time of publication, only the Watch 47 is available for order, but Wyze tells us that the 44 is coming soon. We’ll update this review when it’s available.