Box contents
The usual: watch with strap, cable, manual.
Design and Build Quality
The HT36 is a good-looking, jet-black watch with a zinc alloy bezel and a plastic body. The crown has a lovely orange highlight, as does the torch opening. On the left-hand side, there’s a single button that acts as a shortcut to the workouts list, and unfortunately, it’s not customizable – I would have loved to be able to map this button to the torch.
The build quality of the watch is high. It feels solid and durable, but note this is not a rugged smartwatch – there’s no Gorilla Glass or high-strength materials, which is to be expected and not a criticism considering the price point. That being said, after a week of wearing it, the watch remains unblemished.
The back is made of hard plastic, with charging pins and windows for the heart rate and SpO2 sensors.
It sports a torch on the right-hand side. It’s not particularly bright – especially not compared to other watches like the KT80 – but it’s still really useful and bright enough to use in a pinch. The positioning is unfortunate, though, as your hand blocks about half the beam.
Two physical buttons provide access to menus and power:
- Right: power button when long-pressed, back to the watch face, and when on the watch face, it opens the apps menu. The crown is rotary and functional, but a little stiff – you’ll need two fingers to operate it.
- Left: shortcut to the workouts app (top left). Long-press also takes you to the workouts – I feel this was a missed opportunity to map long-press to the torch.
Display
It has a 2.01-inch IPS display, which is pretty bright but not particularly high resolution. The manufacturer has not published its brightness in nits, but outdoors it’s clearly visible as long as you’re not standing directly under midday summer sun glare. The display is also clearly visible when wearing polarised sunglasses.
The glass is unfortunately not Corning Gorilla or sapphire, which is not really a criticism and is to be expected at this price range. It is, however, recessed, so putting the watch face down should protect it from getting scratched for the most part.
As usual, getting screen protectors for this form factor is problematic, as many of these displays have slightly different sizes and aspect ratios, as well as different corner radii.
All in all, it’s an adequate display at this price range and there’s little to complain about.
Watch interface
The HT36 uses the GloryFitPro app but does not use the exact same watch OS as other watches paired with the same app, like the K67A. Instead, it seems to use an earlier iteration that sits between that version of the watch OS and the firmware used on GloryFit watches, like the QX12. It has elements of both, and it works well enough – I personally find it more intuitive than the newer system, which, while feature-rich, has a weird distribution of pull directions for quick settings, notifications, etc.
As mentioned above, the display is not high resolution, which has two consequences:
- The UI’s fluidity is actually pretty good. It’s not 60fps smooth, but it’s certainly not janky and is a pleasure to use.
- The text in certain menus is larger than I’d personally prefer, which detracts from having such a relatively large display. A setting to control font sizing would be welcome here, even if it makes some text a bit pixelated.
Regardless, the watch’s interface is pretty standard and should be familiar to anybody who’s used a smartwatch before.
From the watch face, swiping down brings up the quick settings, which are not editable. There are only 6 options, but they’re ones you’d want there, like a shortcut to the torch, screen brightness, settings, and find my phone:
Swiping left takes you to the usual configuration of cards: daily activity ring, heart rate, weather, SpO2, sleep tracking, Bluetooth media player control, barometer/altimeter, and compass.
Swiping up brings up the notifications. These are fairly simple – they mirror your phone’s notifications and nothing else. You can choose which app notifications to send to the watch in the app. However, the selection of available apps is very narrow and, on my phone, has some glaring omissions like Google Calendar or my banking apps. You can get around this problem with the “Notify for Smartwatches” app from the Play Store, which is selectable in GloryFitPro and, in turn, allows you to funnel notifications from unsupported apps.
Swiping right brings up a small overlay with the clock, the weather (not clickable), and the last 4 apps you opened from the apps menu. This is quite a common feature on these watches.
Finally, clicking the crown opens the apps menu. There are several styles of menu, like icon grids and the like, which you can switch around either from settings or by double-clicking the crown, but I’ve found them pretty useless. The list menu gives you the best chance of quickly locating what you’re after, as it not only shows the app names but also shows them for all the apps currently on screen.
Watch faces
The watch comes with 9 pre-installed watch faces that cannot be removed, plus the slot for the customisable one (the app allows you to select a photo as a background and tweak the colour and positioning of the clock), plus another slot for downloadable watch faces.
I’m personally not a fan of any of the provided watch faces, and the selection on the app is rather poor, but there are some workable ones, depending on what you’re after in a watch face (I favour loads of clearly visible complications).
Battery Life and Charging
Battery life is good. In my testing, I could stretch the 540mAh battery to just about a week of heavy usage, with daily activity tracking including GPS, full-brightness outside, checking notifications, making and receiving calls, and raise-to-wake enabled. More frugal usage will give you extra days, but honestly, charging once a week is definitely more than good enough for me.
The magnetic charging cable attaches securely and charges the watch from empty to full in about 1 hour. The watch also features power-saving modes that can extend battery life even further by limiting certain features, like notifications.
Health Monitoring
The HT36 covers the basics of health monitoring with 24/7 heart rate tracking, blood oxygen monitoring, sleep tracking, female cycle tracking, and stress. While these features work reasonably well, they don’t match the accuracy or depth of analysis provided by Apple, Garmin, or Fitbit devices. Again, it’s important to remember the price of this watch.
Heart rate and SpO2
This watch sports the VC30F-S sensor, which is found widely in the budget segment of Chinese watches. Specifically, it seems like it’s the same heart rate sensor used across – but not limited to – all of the GloryFit and GloryFitPro watches.
Continuous heart rate monitoring, as recorded by stats and the app, is done on a schedule, which is somewhat configurable (5, 10, 20 minutes…), and the heart rate sensor will also wake up when the screen is woken up to take live readings until the screen goes off.
The sensor on this watch - or the software governing it - is unfortunately rather buggy. It has a very serious cold boot issue whereby the sensor records what looks like double the heart rate when it wakes up from being off, and sometimes continues to do so until it shuts down again. This completely messes up the heart rate monitoring, as your readings will appear ridiculously high all day long. You can see a comparison of the same 24h period with a Pixel Watch 2 via Fitbit:
I have observed the same behaviour on other watches running GloryFit and GloryFitPro, like the K67A, the Y101 and the QX12. That being said, on this watch in particular, once it locks on to your heart rate after the initial peak it remains mostly true as long as the sensor doesn’t shut down, as you’ll be able to see a bit further down on the activity tracking section.
The issue may or may not be related to the watch’s movement, as often during sleep the readings look (mostly) normal. Wearing the watch pretty tight, however, makes no difference to the reliability of the readings.
Sleep tracking
I found sleep tracking to be surprisingly accurate compared to my Pixel Watch 2. The watch was able to successfully detect my sleep and wake-up times, as well as provide a reasonable ballpark of the different sleep stages. The only part it seemed to struggle with was recognising short wake-up moments during the night, and sometimes counting REM sleep in light sleep and viceversa, but to be fair sleep tracking is hard even with lab equipment. Very pleasantly surprised in this regard.
Stress
Not much to say about this. It measures your heart rate, then gives you a stress score. It seems to be reasonably accurate when the heart rate sensor was working properly, but I found its usefulness to be rather limited - more of a curiosity.
Fitness and Outdoor Features
GPS and compass
The HT36 supports multiple sports modes, covering everything from running and cycling to more niche activities. The GPS with AGPS provides reliable tracking in most environments, though it’s not quite as precise as the multi-band GPS systems found in premium watches. In my workouts, however, I found the GPS to reliably track my routes with very little wobble. Here’s an example of a recent outdoor walk:
In general this is a pretty good result, considering the single-band nature of the GPS feature and the fact I live in a high-rise, densely populated area.
The watch also offers the possibility to reverse your route during a tracked walk, by bringing up the tracked route during the workout and tapping at the top of the display.
Regarding the compass, as long as you calibrate it before you need it by swinging your arm in a figure of 8, it works fine being able to track north accurately.
Workouts
When it comes to stats like distances, calorie burns, steps, and heart rates, I found it to be reasonably close to my reference Pixel Watch 2, which is one of the best watches on the market for this. The GloryFitPro app and watch OS system have really been polished from the earlier GloryFit system, and you can tell a lot of effort has been put into the number crunching that goes into generating those stats.
Here’s a strength training session taken on both the HT36 and the Pixel Watch 2. Calorie estimation and heart rate are really good, although if you’re eagle-eyed you can see a number of instances where the HT36 failed to register some peaks on heart rate which are par for the course for strength training. But nothing that detracts from the overall good result:
This is a walking pad session recorded on both. Note the step count is still relatively similar, if low, considering the fact I wasn’t swinging my arms most of the time as I did it at my desk while I worked:
Here’s an outdoor walk taken on both the HT36 and the Pixel Watch 2. There’s a 400m discrepancy on distance and as a result as well of pacing, but in this case the Pixel Watch’s GPS tracking took a bit of a wobble. Surprisingly, the HT36’s was far better:
All in all, I have to say I’m very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the data, calorie estimation and GPS tracking. Definitely very usable and I would have no issues tracking all of my workouts permanently with this watch.
Smartwatch Features
As a smartwatch, the HT36 offers notification mirroring, music control, weather updates, and a handful of basic apps. The notification system works well enough, displaying messages and alerts from your phone, though interaction options are limited.
Some of them:
- Notifications / messages: these watches don’t truly allow you to read your messages. Instead, they mirror your notifications and are thus limited by what they show. Notifications are grouped by app and they work well enough, but there are some glaring omissions on the list of apps that can be whitelisted, like Google Calendar. The “Notify for Smartwatches” app on the Play Store can help with this.
- Alarms: they can be created in-watch and work reliably.
- Timers: timers can be left in the background without being discarded and also work well enough, but they only vibrate for some reason. But they vibrate for quite a while, so they’re hard to miss.
- Bluetooth calling: no issues here. The speaker and microphone work really well. Callers could hear me and I could hear them just fine. Worked impeccably.
- Weather: the weather app is fairly basic. It gives the current conditions, min/max temperature for the day, sky condition, humidity and UV. Then a very simple 7 day forecast with an icon for the weather condition and min/max temps for each day.
- Find my phone / watch: works fine both ways.
The app: GloryFitPro
In my usage, I found the connection to the app to be stable without dropouts. Notifications would arrive in some cases even before on my reference Pixel Watch 2.
The app itself is very nicely laid out. Daily monitoring features like heart rate and SpO2 are easily accessible and displayed with relevant data and nice-looking graphs - which can’t be zoomed into but do provide reading values and timestamps when tapped.
Workout records were, however, a bit unclear to get to - you can’t see a list of workouts and then choose which one to
look at. Instead, you go to the Sports tab, look for the tab corresponding to the type of workout (e.g.,
Outdoor Walk), which looks simply like a screen where you start a new activity, then tap on whatever stat is
highlighted at the very top (e.g., Cumulative consumption (kcal) on strength training). That being said, the app
offers a lot of data laid out nicely and there’s very little else to complain about here.
Conclusion
The HT36 smartwatch is a phenomenal watch in the £25 price bracket. I’d dare say you’d be hard-pressed to find any watch at this price that will do as well as this one. It’s well built, it’s got a decent torch, a good screen, great activity tracking, smartwatch features, and good battery life. I’m really very pleasantly surprised with it.
The one thing that unfortunately lets the watch down is the buggy heart rate monitoring. It pollutes your daily monitoring data with phantom heart rate peaks and makes the 24h HR monitoring a bit useless. But during workouts, once it locks on to your heart rate, I found it to be reliable enough.
Overall, the HT36 punches well above its weight. If you’re looking for a budget-friendly GPS watch with solid sports tracking, respectable build quality, and just enough smartwatch features to be useful, this is an excellent choice – as long as you’re aware of the heart rate bug and can live with its limitations. For casual users and fitness enthusiasts on a budget, it’s a very solid recommendation.