Everything. Everything about the user experience is the catch. It’s the catchiest catch. Virtually every screen, every quest to change settings, every attempt to do even more the most rudimentary thing left me wanting to tear my hair out. It’s almost impressive how bad it is.
For starters, virtually everything takes more button clicks than it should, and menu items are rarely where you expect them to be. Sometimes you have to fully end an activity (not simply pause it) in order to get to the main menu and fix whatever needs fixing. If you try to circumvent that by long-pressing the top right button to get to Zepp Flow, you are in for a ton of lag. Sometimes it takes Zepp Flow eight seconds to respond. Or maybe never at all! It’s very frustrating.
The watch has 26GB of storage (for music and maps), so you can install MP3s if you have some saved on your computer, but the watch has none of your favorite music apps, which means no offline streaming. You can use it to control the music playing from your phone, but then you must have your earbuds connected to your phone, rather than your watch. And so on, and on, and on. This is Fitness Tracker 101 stuff. Playing music should be easy.
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Photograph: Brent Rose
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