Box contents
Kospet’s packaging is excellent - a hard box containing the watch with the strap already fitted, charging cable, manual and screen‑protector film.
Design and Build Quality
The Kospet Pulse is a very compact, lightweight watch with an aluminium alloy bezel and middle frame, and a plastic back cover. It has a single button on its right‑hand side, which doubles as a crown. It comes in two colours, black and silver in Kospet’s words - I bought the silver version and it’s actually more like a gunmetal grey - a lovely colour that really suits the watch.
The build quality of the watch is excellent. The metal body and Corning Gorilla Glass are durable - after nearly two weeks of use, it remains unblemished. It’s also very lightweight, at 45 g with the included silicone strap - you can barely feel it on your wrist.
The right‑hand side of the watch contains the single button, which also serves as a crown. It’s very smooth in operation and can easily be rotated with a fingertip. The screen has a small orange detail where the crown sits, and the crown also has an orange highlight with the Kospet logo. Pressing it opens the application list from the watch face; a long press opens the power menu.
Although I’m missing a few data points, this appears to be a pared‑back Tank T3: no rugged casing or GPS, but the same ATS3085L MCU, heart‑rate sensor, and display specs. My guess is Kospet is preparing the next Tank generation on the Magic hardware platform and clearing older parts in the meantime. That’s sensible for a budget line and not a drawback.
Display
The 1.96-inch AMOLED is bright and punchy, and its 1000-nit peak keeps it readable in direct sun - it also remains visible when wearing polarised sunglasses. At 410×502, it looks crisp for both text and graphics.
It’s covered by Corning Gorilla Glass 3 and sits slightly recessed from the bezel, which helps avoid scratches when placed face-down.
Screen protectors are a hassle: the included film is fiddly to fit and prone to bubbles. Kospet doesn’t yet sell replacements, and - judging by other models - their single-film packs are poor value at about £13 and aren’t tempered glass, so I wouldn’t recommend buying them.
Always-on display is supported, but it hurts battery life considerably. Raise-to-wake is very responsive and far more efficient - that’s what I’ve used without issues.
Watch interface
Kospet’s Bluetooth watches run a variant of the GloryFitPro firmware. The old Kospet Fit app was clearly a customised fork, sharing the same watch‑face catalogue (no longer true with the new app; more below). That’s good news: the OS is feature‑rich - one of the best in this class.
The UI is intuitive and polished but not especially smooth: frame rates drop on heavier pages. It’s still perfectly usable, though at this price I wish Kospet had used the newer Actions ATS3085S, as on the Magic series.
From the watch face, a downward swipe opens editable quick settings with lots of genuinely useful toggles:
Swiping left opens the apps menu - the same action as pressing the crown - so the gesture feels somewhat wasted.
There are several menu styles (grids, etc.), but list view is the fastest because it shows names for everything on screen. Unfortunately, the sort order seems semi‑random, which makes items harder to find:
A right swipe shows notifications. They simply mirror your phone’s alerts. You can choose which apps forward notifications in the companion app; the new Apexmove app is far better than GloryFitPro here and exposes virtually any installed app.
Swiping up opens the cards panel for daily activity, heart rate, sleep, timers, and more. It’s the best way to use most apps, and you can reorder or remove cards to suit your needs.
Note: some settings are buried inside individual apps on the watch (e.g., finer heart‑rate options). Open the app on the watch and scroll to the bottom to find them.
Watch faces
The watch comes with 7 preinstalled watch faces that cannot be removed, and allows you to install a further 4 from the app. The selection on the app is ample, and in fact you can really tell Kospet has invested a lot of resources into furnishing the new app with a really, really good selection of new watch faces that you wouldn’t find on GloryFitPro. Here are a few examples of default and downloaded watch faces:
AOD has its own separate pool of watch faces - seven preinstalled and one installable from the app. New to this series is that some of the default watch faces are now AOD‑enabled:
Battery Life and Charging
With no onboard GPS - a major power draw - the 350 mAh battery delivers excellent endurance. In my testing it lasted just under 12 days from 100% to shutdown with AOD off and raise-to-wake on. I logged every workout and multiple daily walks. Battery life simply isn’t a concern.
AOD, however, is very demanding: starting from a full charge, the watch dropped to 70% in a single day. This run was after the watch had been fully set up (no “new toy” drain) and followed a couple of days with AOD before recharging to full.
Also note the Pulse’s battery gauge seems skewed at higher percentages. On that 12-day run it reported 85% after day one and 70% after day two, then declined progressively more slowly; the last three days before shutdown used about 4% battery per day before it finally powered off. Kospet’s firmware clearly needs tuning to improve charge reporting, but real-world longevity remains excellent.
Health Monitoring
The Kospet Pulse covers the basics of health monitoring with 24/7 heart rate tracking, blood oxygen monitoring and sleep tracking.
Heart rate and SpO2
With regard to the heart rate sensors, this watch sports the VC9202+VP60A2 sensor, which seems to be manufactured by VCare, who also manufacture the VC30F-S which is so problematic on GloryFitPro watches (see the K67A smartwatch review). As such, it has some of the same problems that sensor has - initial, double-value readings when the sensor turns on. It seems, however, of better quality than the VC30F-S and recovers to a true reading more quickly.
Thankfully, the Apexmove app is much better at either discarding those initial readings or at detecting them and correcting them than GloryFitPro, so it’s not a huge issue.
Heart rate tracking during workouts is quite good, but not as good as the newer sensor that the Kospet Magic series has (review of the Kospet Magic R10 coming soon). More on this below.
Continuous heart rate monitoring, as recorded in the stats and the app, is done on a schedule that is somewhat configurable (5, 10, 20 minutes…), and the heart rate sensor will also wake when the screen turns on to take live readings until the screen goes off.
Sleep tracking
I found sleep tracking to be surprisingly decent, 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, especially deep sleep. It does seem to confuse REM with light sleep in places, but that’s quite common even on top-shelf sleep trackers. The watch did, however, fail to detect short wake-up moments during the night, such as loo visits.
Stress
Not much to say about this. It measures your heart rate, then gives you a stress score. It seems to be reasonably accurate, but I found its usefulness to be rather limited - more of a curiosity.
Emotional state
I honestly have no idea what this is meant to do or how it works. Probably filler functionality that could be removed by the manufacturer.
One-tap health check
The Kospet Pulse has a one-tap health check feature that allows you to quickly check your heart rate, blood oxygen, and stress levels. It’s handy, but I don’t personally find myself using it much since it requires you to stand still for 60 seconds, and ain’t nobody got time for that.
Fitness and Outdoor Features
The Kospet Pulse offers a broad set of sports modes, from running and cycling to niche activities. There’s no built‑in GPS, but it can piggy‑back on your phone’s via the Apexmove app. One caveat: due to a current bug, Apexmove won’t request full background location until you start a GPS workout from the phone app (not the watch) - do this once.
The step counter is excellent. It tracks walks and runs reliably and doesn’t overcount when you’re at home doing stuff with your arms, unlike many watches.
For distance, calories, steps, and heart rate, results were broadly in line with my reference Pixel Watch 2, which is a far more advanced fitness tracker. Excellent work here.
Workout heart rate tracking is reasonably accurate but slow to catch sudden spikes (e.g., weight training or intervals), so peaks can be missed. For steady cardio and walks, it’s largely spot‑on.
Here’s an outdoor walk on the Kospet Pulse:
An elliptical training session:
A strength training session. You can really see here what I mentioned earlier about the sensor missing sudden heart rate peaks:
Smartwatch Features
The Pulse covers the core smartwatch basics: notification mirroring, music controls, weather, and a few simple apps.
Some highlights:
- Notifications / messages: you don’t truly read messages on the watch; it mirrors your phone’s alerts. They’re grouped by app and work reliably. Messages like those from WhatsApp show a fair bit of text, but not nearly as much as KrikiOS watches like the FT66. Apexmove lets you pick virtually any app to forward.
- Alarms: set directly on the watch and very reliable. Loud as well, you won’t be sleeping through those.
- Timers: can run in the background; vibration‑only, but the long buzz makes them hard to miss.
- Bluetooth calling: speaker and mic are solid. Calls were clear both ways and worked flawlessly in testing.
- Weather: the best I’ve seen on a budget watch: current conditions, 12‑hour and 7‑day forecasts in a clean, readable layout.
- Find my phone / watch: works in both directions pretty well, as the watch seems to have very good Bluetooth range.
The app: Apexmove
I’ll cover the app in a separate review later, as I’d rather avoid repeating myself given I intend to cover Kospet watches quite a lot here, so I’ll be brief.
Until now, Kospet has been using basically a reskinned version of GloryFitPro in the shape of Kospet Fit. With the launch of the Magic series, they’ve launched their new app, Apexmove, which is a complete rewrite of the old app. It’s much better in pretty much every regard, from vitals data display to watch management, which includes the ability to pair more than one watch to your phone.
Not only that, Kospet has gone full‑on with their own library of watch faces - you can see a few here and there from GloryFitPro, but the vast majority seem exclusive to Kospet. They’re really high quality, and the choice is abundant. Some are paid, but to be honest it’s not a problem considering the number of excellent watch faces available.
The connection to the watch is solid. The watch has quite a bit of range as well, so notifications and phone calls are received reliably as you move around your home with the phone elsewhere.
Bugs, issues and feedback sent to Kospet
I ran into a few issues:
- Raise‑to‑wake can’t be automated. On GloryFitPro watches it’s tied to Do Not Disturb (and thus automatable). I raised this during my Magic R10 testing; Kospet didn’t seem keen to change it though and said it was by design. Very annoying as you need to manually turn it off and on daily - if you want to avoid getting woken up by the watch whenever you move.
- On several occasions Apexmove lost health data: it disappeared from the app while still present on the watch and wouldn’t sync back despite refreshes. This also happened during my time testing the Magic R10.
- Twice the watch stopped recording heart rate until a reboot. The LEDs were active, but no HR was logged.
- Some third‑party watch faces omit the middle “0” in heart rates from 100–109.
- Ongoing Apexmove background‑location permission quirk affecting GPS workouts (see above).
I reported everything through the app. Kospet has been responsive and appears to be working on fixes, but none had shipped at the time of writing. The HR‑sensor issue, in particular, received prompt attention and helpful back‑and‑forth. Overall, much better than most brands in acknowledging and addressing bugs.
Conclusion
The Kospet Pulse nails the fundamentals for a budget Bluetooth smartwatch. It looks and feels well made; the AMOLED screen is excellent; battery life is genuinely long; and the day‑to‑day experience (notifications, calls, weather, timers, alarms) is reliable and pleasant. Activity tracking is strong for steps, distance, and steady cardio, though the HR sensor can miss abrupt spikes. There’s no onboard GPS, but phone‑assisted GPS via Apexmove works fine once set up.
The main caveats are AOD’s heavy drain, the non‑automatable raise‑to‑wake, a few minor bugs still pending fixes, and a price that feels a touch high for the hardware. None of these are deal‑breakers if you value long battery life, a great display, and solid everyday features over pro‑grade training metrics.
On pricing, the £79 list price is simply too high for a watch without GPS - brands like Amazfit and Huawei offer more features and better sensors at similar RRPs. The good news is Kospet frequently runs promotions that bring the Pulse into the ~£50 range; I picked mine up on AliExpress for £29 with stacked coupons, so deals do surface if you watch for them.
Apexmove itself is a big step forward for Kospet - stable connectivity, granular notification control, and a standout watch‑face catalogue.
Verdict: recommended for most users seeking a polished budget smartwatch with excellent endurance - so long as you can live without built‑in GPS and can accept the HR caveats.