How good is the $45 Anko Smart Watch?

I trialled the Anko Smart Watch KM43243303 ($45) from Kmart to see how well this inexpensive smartwatch with sports tracking compares to my trusty Garmin.

I’d bought the Garmin Venu Sq as it had, at the time, the best overall score in our smartwatches & fitness trackers test, while being relatively inexpensive (it was about $370 back then). In particular, it received top marks for fitness tracking accuracy.

I love my Garmin and was keen to see how the significantly cheaper Anko Smart Watch stacked up in comparison. I fully charged both watches, matched their settings and wore one on each wrist full-time for a week.

Pros and cons of the Anko Smart Watch

Pros

• Fairly easy to set up
• Easy to use on-board controls and menu
• Very good battery
• Reliable phone notifications
• Can record sports activities without your phone
• Fairly accurate step count tracking
• Accurate recording of average and maximum heart rate from activities
• Rain and sweat resistant
• Has a find phone feature
• Customisable watch face
• Inexpensive

Cons

• Screen slow to wake and hard to read in bright light
• No GPS, so distance recording somewhat inaccurate (based on step count)
• Distance recording only available for walking and running
• No distance or pace available during an activity recording
• Can’t check the time during an activity recording
• Erratic real-time heart rate readings
• Poor sleep tracking
• Some activity options aren’t appropriate
• Some features and data aren’t useful
• App is poorly designed
• Notifications only display basic text (no emojis) and words split across lines
• Alarms can’t be controlled from the watch
• Proprietary charging cable might not be replaceable (Kmart can’t confirm)

Summary

The Anko Smart Watch is an inexpensive, water-resistant smartwatch with a good battery and customisable watch face. It reliably delivers phone notifications and its step count is fairly accurate. It’s worth the $45.

But the screen is frustratingly slow to wake, particularly when using the wrist-flip gesture. It doesn’t have GPS nor provide any real-time distance and pace data, so it’s not good for cyclists or runners. It also can’t be used for swimming or strength training. And its health tracking data should be taken with a grain of salt.

It’s best for those that want a basic smartwatch with a pedometer function. People wanting sports and fitness tracking should choose a watch with GPS – you can compare models in our smartwatches & fitness trackers test.

Keep reading for the full low-down on the Anko Smart Watch and its app.

Design

The Anko Smart Watch feels robust and comfortable, and it’s rated IP67 (dust and water resistant). It weighs 39g and has a 43 x 37 x 11mm rectangular watch face with a touchscreen and one side button.

It comes with a 21mm-wide quick-release silicone strap that’s long enough to fit a wide range of wrist sizes. The strap has a metal buckle and two silicone retainers. It’s fairly secure, but the end of the strap can come out if you get particularly sweaty as the retainers don’t have any grip. This happened to me on a 45-minute run.

The watch and strap are entirely black. It doesn’t look like you can buy different Anko sports straps if you want to switch up the colour. But Kmart sells compatible dress straps in tortoiseshell, gold, gold mesh, and black mesh. And you can probably source sports straps from third-party suppliers since the size and attachment design are common.

The watch comes with a proprietary charging cable that attaches by magnets to the back of the watch. You need to be careful not to knock it out of place when charging. I asked Kmart whether replacement cables are available to buy – its rep wasn’t sure.

Setup

The watch comes with a very basic user manual and is fairly easy to set up. Attaching the strap is self-explanatory, as is charging the watch. You then download the Glory Fit app, activate Bluetooth on your phone, pair with the watch, and follow instructions in the app.

Although the app recognises what make your phone is, it didn’t direct me to the right settings for my Samsung Galaxy A54. Although I was able to work out what was needed without much hassle.

You then set your gender, height, weight, date of birth, and daily step count target. When you’re done, you’ll find yourself in the app’s Device tab where you can customise settings. You’re not instructed to customise settings in the Me tab, but you’ll need to do that too.

The final steps in the user manual direct you to choose a watch face and explore the watch menu.

Interface

You can turn the watch on or off with a 3-second press of the side button. Once on, you wake the screen by pressing the side button or flipping your wrist towards you. But the screen is slow to wake, taking 1–2 seconds with the button and 2–3 seconds for the wrist flip.

That’s slow enough to be both frustrating and a hazard as a trail runner. I’m clumsy enough without the added risk of tripping because my eyes are off the trail too long. The screen is also hard to read in bright light and the data displayed is fairly small. You can customise the screen timeout in the app.

There are five pre-set watch faces available on the watch and many more in the app (although mostly Christmas-themed). You can also create a custom face with a photo from your phone gallery, which is a nice touch.

The touchscreen is excellent – much more responsive than my Garmin. The menu is fairly easy to navigate too as it’s not overloaded with features.

Swiping the touchscreen gives options for activity recording, tracking daily steps, distance and calories burned, heart rate monitoring, blood pressure and oxygen saturation checks, body and atmospheric temperature readings, sleep tracking, weather conditions, music control (for your paired phone), and messages.

There’s also a “more” option, with a stopwatch, timer, and phone locator. And “settings” allows you to change the watch face, adjust brightness, view device info, turn off the watch, or reset to erase data.

Swiping up from the main screen is a short-cut to messages. Swiping down gives options for on/off, do not disturb, adjust brightness, find phone, and settings.

To go back a step, you can either swipe right or press the side button – easy.

Recording an activity

Selecting one of the sports from the training list will start a silent 3-second countdown then begin recording. While recording, the screen shows your current duration, heart rate and how many calories you’ve burned so far.

You can’t customise what’s displayed during an activity like you can with my Garmin. For some (particularly runners), distance and pace are more valuable than calories burned. There’s also an issue with the real-time heart rate data (see Fitness features > Heart rate below).

In addition, you can’t view other screens during a recording, and you can’t check the time, which would be handy when out on a mission lasting a few hours.

Pressing the side button during an activity will pause the recording. From there, you can resume or stop and save.

App

The Glory Fit app is available for both Android and iOS. Some of its areas are difficult to navigate, as certain data and settings are in unusual places, labelled poorly, or simply don’t make sense. I found my way around through experimenting, but it’s not well designed.

There are four main tabs on the app dashboard: Home, Sports, Device, and Me. The main issues are within the Sports and Me tabs.

Home

The Home tab provides a daily overview, including current weather, step count, calories burned, sleep hours, plus graphs for heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature.

Sports

The Sports tab has four customisable tabs at the top for your favourite activities. Selecting one provides a number for your last activity. For most activities, that number represents calories burned. But for walking, outdoor running or outdoor cycling, it’s distance. However, you’ll always get 0.00 for your last outdoor cycling session as the watch can’t record cycling distance – not very useful.

It’s not clear where you can access previous activity records. You need to press a small line of text (under the number) that gives the total distance covered or calories burned for the selected activity for the month. Doing so brings up a list of all records for the relevant activity, and clicking on one gives you a summary.

Confusingly, there are three pace fields for outdoor running – minimum pace (minutes/mile), slowest pace (minutes/km) and fastest pace (minutes/km). That’s not a typo – the first one is in miles rather than kilometres, and minimum pace and slowest pace sound like the same thing to me. Yet only the first field contains data.

The Sports tab also has settings and targets. But the symbols are so small it’s easy to overlook them. Settings allows you to set a maximum heart rate warning (but only up to 180bpm, which I frequently exceed when running), or verbally broadcast your distance, duration and heart rate at set intervals during certain activities.

Pressing the target symbol allows you to set a distance, duration or calorie burn target for your next walking, running or cycling session.

Device

This is where you set the language, time system (12 or 24 hours) and the watch’s screen timeout. It’s also where you can use the watch finding feature and give permission for your watch to find your phone. You can unpair from the watch here too.

The Device tab also lets you change the watch face, set times for daily heart rate and body temperature readings, turn on/off various phone notifications, set a sedentary reminder, set alarms and do not disturb hours, turn on/off the wrist flip to wake function, check for firmware updates, and clear data.

Me

The Me tab stores your personal information and body metrics, lets you set units of measurement, set phone permissions, and connect to other apps. There’s also a privacy policy and user agreement, plus common problems and solutions.

In addition, you can set a daily step count target. But, oddly, that’s under both Training Plan and Goal Setting. At first glance, it seems there’s nothing else in either of those areas. In fact, Training Plan lets you schedule training reminders too, but only if you first set a step count goal – otherwise it’s hidden.

Once you’ve set a training reminder, you can adjust the time of the reminder, but you can’t change the day of training without deleting it and starting afresh. In addition, training reminders aren’t sent as alerts to the watch – they just make your phone ring. I also found it impossible to dismiss or silence the reminders on my phone – it’d simply stop ringing after a period of time.

A weekly health report is also contained in the Me tab, including sleep, calories, step count, distance, blood pressure and heart rate data. But, for heart rate, you’ll only get an average for the whole week. I’m not sure how that’s useful – it’d be better to have the average resting and maximum heart rates for the week.

In addition, there’s confusing reference data provided. For example, the blood pressure reference is 115/70. My average blood pressure reading was 120/77, which the app rated as “high”. But further down the screen, there’s a statement that normal blood pressure is <130/85 and ideal is 120/80.

Standard watch features

Once you’ve paired the watch with your phone and enabled location services, the watch time is set and remains accurate.

While it’s possible to set alarms from the app, which will vibrate your watch, you can’t set or cancel alarms from the watch. Also, it’s only possible to set recurring alarms. For a one-off alarm, you need to remember to cancel it from the app later.

The watch has a stopwatch plus a timer, although you’re stuck with four pre-set options of 1, 3, 5 or 10 minutes. A customisable timer would be better.

Smart features

The Anko Smart Watch reliably delivers SMS, WhatsApp, social media, email and calendar notifications when within about 10m of your Bluetooth connected phone. Notifications arrive with a strong watch vibration so you won’t miss them, and the watch will store the last five notifications.

But words often split across lines and emojis display as empty squares. This makes messages harder to read than on premium smartwatches. In addition, you can’t reply to messages with the Anko as you can with my Garmin.

Notifications can be switched on or off via the Glory Fit app. Switching them off will extend the watch’s battery life.

Other smart features include current weather conditions, music control, find phone, and find watch (via the app). The latter causes the watch to buzz if its within Bluetooth range of your phone – although it’s not strong enough to detect unless you happen to be sitting on it.

Fitness features

Activity recording

The Anko Smart Watch allows you to record outdoor activities even when your phone is at home, which is great. The watch will sync with the app when you’re next within Bluetooth range of your phone.

There are a whopping 24 activities, with the usual walking, running and cycling options, plus a whole lot more including alpinism, ping pong and even boating (I assume that’s for kayaking or rowing). But there’s no option for strength training. And bizarrely, there’s a swimming option even though the user manual states not to use the watch while swimming.

You can sync recorded activities with Google Fit or WeChat Sports, but you can’t upload your data to Strava (popular with the fitness community) as you can with premium models.

Distance recording

The Anko’s distance recording is only an estimate based on step count rather than GPS. So, it can’t record distance for cycling. In fact, it only records distance for walking and running even though there are several other foot-based activity options, including mountain hiking.

For reference, my Garmin Venu Sq scored 100% for distance accuracy in testing and has been spot-on for several accurately measured races I’ve completed. By comparison, the Anko only recorded, on average, 92% of the distance my Garmin recorded. And there were occasions where the Anko only recorded 81% (e.g. 6.1km of a 7.5km run). Such a difference would be frustrating for those using distance to progress themselves, as many do. It’ll likely also mean not having a record when reaching race milestones like 5km or a half marathon.

In addition, you can’t crop an activity if you’ve forgotten to stop recording when you’re done. And there’s no map of where you’ve been or any estimate of your elevation gain to look at in the app afterwards. These features are common with premium sports watches.

Heart rate

The average and maximum heart rates recorded from activities are accurate. They’re extremely similar to my Garmin, which scored 90% for heart rate accuracy in testing.

But the real-time heart rate displayed on the Anko is erratic and was sometimes up to 20bpm different from my Garmin. Also, you can’t set customised heart rate training zones. This means it’s not possible to use the Anko to train by heart rate, which many runners and cyclists do.

Step count

The Anko’s step count is fairly accurate, recording only slightly fewer steps (about 94%) than my Garmin, which scored 100% for step count accuracy in testing.

Sleep and health tracking

Sleep tracking

The Anko does a poor job of tracking sleep. During the trial, it recorded an average difference of about 50 minutes sleep per night compared to my Garmin – over 2 hours difference one night. For reference, the Garmin Venu Sq scored 83% for sleep tracking in testing, and I’ve found it consistently records a very similar amount of sleep to what I think I’ve had.

In addition, there are massive differences in the Anko’s recording of deep vs light sleep compared to my Garmin – over 4.5 hours difference one night. And the Anko doesn’t provide an estimate of REM sleep, which my Garmin does.

Other health tracking

The Anko watch provides readings for body temperature, blood pressure and blood oxygen saturation. I’m not sure how accurate these are. The Anko’s blood pressure readings were similar to what I get when the doctor takes my blood pressure using a cuff and stethoscope. But the body temperature readings always suggested my temperature was unusually low.

Battery

The Anko has a very good 170mAh lithium polymer battery. It charges in less than an hour and lasts 5½ days with its smart features enabled and being used for daily activity recordings. By comparison, my 2-year-old Garmin only lasted 3½ days with the same settings and activities recorded.

I’d expect the Anko’s battery to last significantly longer with phone notifications switched off as is the case with my Garmin.

The Anko doesn’t provide a precise battery level reading (my Garmin gives a percentage), but there’s a four-bar battery level indicator on all but the main screen. When the battery level becomes critical and the watch needs recharging, the indicator bars change from green to red.