Smartwatches are getting better and better with each passing month and they’re also getting cheaper, at least on some markets. If you can’t yet afford a Samsung Gear 2 or an Apple Watch, you may want to take a look at what the Chinese have to offer. We recently managed to get our hands on the Zeblaze Crystal, a new smartwatch from China that packs some very interesting features and is also quite resistant to boot. Coming in at a mere $55, the Zeblaze Crystal is undoubtedly cheap, but it is any good?

Right off the bat we’d have to agree that a decent amount of work was put towards making the smartwatch look elegant and classy. The manufacturer succeeded to some degree, however, I can’t help but feel that the leather strap doesn’t really work with a rectangular electronic watch such as this. If that doesn’t bother you, though, you’ll probably enjoy the overall design and come to appreciate the slightly curved display. Moreover, the watch does feel comfortable on the wrist so there’s no need to worry about that.

The Zeblaze Crystal is marketed as being the world’s first crystal display smartwatch with Bi-color injection molding technology and highly resistant stainless steel dial. When it comes to hardiness, this smartwatch is definitely one of the best and even features an IP65 rating, which makes it both dustproof and waterproof. That said, I do have a complaint related to the 1.54-inch 240 x 240 pixel display. For some reason, the manufacturer decided against using a larger portion of the panel for the actual display. Even though you can see this on most other smartwatches, in this particular case it seems a lot more noticeable and might give you the impression that the Zeblaze Crystal is just a tad larger than it should be.

 

Hardware-wise, the Zeblaze Crystal offers the new MTK2502 chipset, 128 MB of RAM, 64 MB of storage, a 280 mAh battery and Bluetooth 4.0 support. Similar to many other Chinese smart watches, the Zeblaze Crystal is compatible with both Android and iOS smartphones. The device doesn’t feature a camera of its own, but it does come equipped a remote camera function that allows you to control the camera on your smartphone directly from your wrist. Personally, I can’t imagine too many scenarios where this is useful, but what I can say for certain is that the function works as intended, as do most of the others for that matter. Way more useful is the remote music control, which can really come in handy if you hate pulling your phone out every few minutes just to change the song. The sound quality is actually pretty decent, so you can listen to music even if you don’t happen to have any earphones on you.

One of the most noticeable features on the Zeblaze Crystal is the heart rate monitor found on the back, which in theory should be just as accurate – if not more so – as the sensor found on the Apple Watch. In practice this isn’t the case, however. The HRM is pretty unreliable and is likely to give you wildly different results each time you check your rate heart. My advice? Check it out for a while and see how it works for you, but for the most part, I would suggest not putting too much faith in it because the technology is clearly not there yet.

 

Heart rate monitor aside, the Zeblaze Crystal sports some additional sensors that are more accurate and thus, more useful. These include things like pedometer, sleep monitor, and sedentary reminder. Speaking of features, you’ve also got anti-theft, voice recorder, alarm, stopwatch, calendar, calculator and of course, you can also pair the device with your smartphone to receive various notifications on your watch, including weather, email, Facebook, Twitter and more. On the downside, the Zeblaze Crystal doesn’t feature a removable back cover and doesn’t support a SIM card or microSD card.

Despite a few cons here and there, the Zeblaze Crystal is well worth the $55 price tag a lot of retailers are asking for it. If you look hard enough you might be able to find even cheaper smartwatches, however, you’ll have a difficult time finding one as hardy as the Zeblaze Crystal. If the manufacturer continues to improve upon previous models I’m sure that future Zeblaze smart watches will be even more impressive, but as it stands, this is still a good effort and worth looking into if you’re in the market for a new smartwatch.