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More features at half the price: This new smartwatch wants to take on Apple Watch

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A watch is consistently a nice piece of jewelry for men and women alike to wear throughout the day. Sure, you can pull out your phone to see what time it is, but very little beats the convenience of flicking your wrist to check. Smartwatches have grown in popularity over the years but they often lack one crucial feature — a good and reliable battery life. Too many of them require charging on a very regular basis, unless you switch off some of the features that make them special. That’s where the Pollix Watch saves the day. It’s a new smartwatch available through a Kickstarter campaign, that offers plenty of great and useful features alongside an impressive 10-day battery life.

The Pollix Watch is a stylish-looking watch that’s clearly taken inspiration from the Apple Watch, while being significantly cheaper. It offers A.I.-based technology through its app so that it can accurately make suggestions about how best to achieve your fitness goals in life. Whether that’s a bid to lose weight, maintain weight, or even gain a few pounds, the Pollix app suggests how best to do it each step of the way.

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It calculates and analyzes your daily activity, the meals you consume, and the workouts you perform before making suggestions on how to improve upon your day through subtle changes. It’s more hands-on in that regard compared to other smartwatches. Pollix also has plans to deploy new algorithms regularly so that it becomes more accurate the more you use it.

There’s no shortage of fitness features here, either. Beside automatic workout detection for mostly every exercise you could think of, 24/7 heart rate monitoring, and a built-in GPS, the Pollix watch also provides 17 exercise modes with the app encouraging you to reach your goals through steady motivation.

That might sound similar to the Fitbit Versa 2 but the Pollix Watch goes further as it also includes ECG monitoring and it can even track your blood pressure accurately. That’s something that even the Apple Watch 5 is not yet able to do without additional accessories.

For the more sedate part of the day, there are also meditation features, sleep tracking, and fatigue monitoring facilities. The latter being something that no other major smartwatch has yet to offer, even the Apple Watch 5 and Fitbit Versa 2. The feature is based on Pollix’s ability to track just how well you’re performing through the day and spotting when you need to take a breather. It learns what works for you.

Most impressive of all is the Pollix Watch’s battery life. It can go 10 or more days without needing recharging, substantially beating the Apple Watch 5’s average battery life of about 2 days, and the Fitbit Versa 2’s formerly respectable 6-day lifespan. That’s remarkable for a watch that also offers more features than either of its main two competitors.

The watch is the work of Pollix, a European firm, that originally started by launching the Pollix fitness tracker in 2016 before moving on to work with the Pollix watch in 2019. Since 2017, the firm has refined its app, developed new algorithms and worked on optimizing its data collection for the best results for customers. Having refined its plans, Pollix launched a Kickstarter campaign in October to raise funds for the Pollix Watch. The campaign ends November 21 which is when production will begin on the units.

The pledge deals start at about $110 for one Pollix Watch in any color, with $206 getting you a Pollix Watch along with a Pollix scale for measuring your weight. $219 gets you a Pollix Tracker, as well as a Pollix Watch, while $300 provides you with the full set of Pollix products including a Watch, Tracker, and Scale. Families may be interested in the family deal which involves a $519 pledge in exchange for 2 Watches, 2 Trackers, and a set of Scales. All orders are expected to ship by March 2020.

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Jennifer Allen
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jennifer Allen is a technology writer with over 15 years of experience in the field. During that time, she's spent the past…
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