Box contents
The box has the usual contents: manual, charging cable, and in this case, it also came with a screen protector, which is a really nice touch.
Design and Build Quality
The NX23 is a very nice-looking watch. Its bezel is zinc alloy, with a hard plastic body and back plate. It’s pretty solidly built and feels good on the wrist without feeling too heavy. After a week of use, there are no marks of note on the watch, and it seems pretty durable, although note this is not a rugged build.
The model I purchased came with a really nice-looking silicone orange-black wristband, which is pretty soft and comfortable to use. It has plenty of holes to allow for adjustment.
The most noticeable characteristic of this watch is its landscape orientation, which is very unusual on smartwatches, although it was and still is commonly seen on Casio conventional watches. The form factor feels good and natural, and it’s actually very comfortable, especially if you have smaller wrists.
It sports a torch on the right-hand side. It’s relatively bright — not quite as bright as the KT80’s, but certainly bright enough to be useful around the house. The side positioning’s trade-off is that it requires you to bend your hand some to avoid half the beam being just lost on your hand. The torch can only be activated from the quick settings menu and offers no beam intensity adjustment, although the torch isn’t bright enough to need it.
Two physical buttons provide access to menus and power:
- Top right: power button when long-pressed, back to watch face, and when on the watch face, it opens the apps menu.
- Bottom right: it’s a shortcut to the workouts app. Clicking it again will activate the first workout shown on screen. Long press does nothing, which is definitely a missed opportunity to have it activate and deactivate the torch.
Display
It has a 2.0-inch 320x385 IPS display, which offers good pixel density and vibrant colours, but it isn’t particularly bright. The manufacturer hasn’t published the max brightness in nits. In full sunlight, you’ll struggle to see anything, but it works in the shade.
It’s important to note that if you’re wearing polarised sunglasses, you’ll struggle to see the screen at any brightness level.
The glass is unfortunately not Corning Gorilla or sapphire, which is not really a criticism and 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. The watch does come with a screen protector, which I’d recommend you fit immediately.
Watch interface
The NX23 uses the exact same watch OS as other FitCloudPro devices do, which is pretty bare on features albeit functional. The system is intuitive enough that anybody familiar with smartwatches will know instantly how to use it.
From the watch face, swiping to the left brings up a few activity cards, but only a very limited list. For instance, the heart rate app is there, but the blood pressure or SpO2 apps are not. You can add and remove from a very limited list here.
Swiping to the right brings up an overlay with a clock, a phone shortcut — which weirdly does not take you to the phone app, but to the Bluetooth audio settings panel where you can select which audio you want to receive from your phone ( calls and media) — a weather widget, and shortcuts to the last two used apps.
Swiping down brings up the quick settings with a few shortcuts and a screen brightness slider. It’s pretty useful and the only way to get to the torch and to enable the Do Not Disturb mode, which cannot be configured on the app to run on a schedule.
Finally, swiping up brings up the notifications panel. Notifications are very bare, with a very limited amount of text shown from them. Just useful enough for you to know they’re there.
Watch faces
The watch comes with 7 preinstalled watch faces that cannot be removed, some of which have actionable buttons (hard to tap though and barely useful), and allows you to install another 2 from the app: one from the watch faces gallery and another customisable one that allows you to set a picture of your choosing but with no complications — just the time.
The downside of the unusual landscape form factor, unfortunately, is the lack of installable watch faces — the app doesn’t have very many of them, and about half are simply a cool picture with the date and time over them.
Battery Life and Charging
Battery life is about average for a watch of this type and battery size (410mAh). In my testing, with a moderately heavy usage pattern that includes tracking a couple of activities a day and with raise-to-wake enabled, I could reach just about 5 days.
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 NX23 covers the basics of health monitoring with 24/7 heart rate tracking, blood oxygen monitoring, sleep tracking, and even blood pressure monitoring, although blood pressure monitoring in a watch without an inflatable band is questionable at best.
Oddly, the app sets a global time window where automated measurements are taken, which excludes sleep — from 8–22h daily. I cannot fathom the logic behind this feature and why anybody would not want to monitor their vitals while sleeping. You can bypass this by setting the start time at 00:00 and the end time at 23:59.
Heart rate and SpO2
I was pleasantly surprised to find the heart rate sensor worked moderately well. There were some unexplainable high heart rate peaks here and there, but in general, I found it to be within a good ballpark of my Pixel Watch 2 reference device.
24h heart rate monitoring, as recorded by stats and the app, is done on a 5-minute schedule, which is not configurable. SpO2 monitoring, however, is not checked on a schedule and has to be done manually by the user, which I found rather odd.
Unfortunately, both watch and app let us down on data sync. I can’t be entirely sure, but I believe the app does not sync with the watch unless you open it on the phone — this is not a background task problem of the app since notifications are received throughout without any problems. The watch seems to be very limited on the amount of internal memory it has, which produces results like these:
Sleep tracking
Sleep tracking isn’t terribly accurate. It failed to detect most awake moments and REM sleep, although it did a fairly good job at pinpointing when I fell asleep and when I finally awoke.
Unfortunately, I can’t show any screenshots, as the app does not have a way of going back in time and looking at the data for a specific day — it just aggregates different sleep stages as a number in a graph.
Blood pressure
Again, there’s no way for a watch like this to measure blood pressure in any meaningful way. The app does offer a calibration option where you can input your last blood pressure reading off a proper blood pressure monitor, but weirdly it offers no way to compare with a watch reading taken at the same time, so I’m not entirely sure exactly how it’s meant to work.
Fitness and Outdoor Features
The fitness tracking feature is pretty basic. Seven come preinstalled with the watch and are non-editable, and you can push an extra one from the app. Again, I understand these watches are very limited memory-wise, but these activities are only a handful of kilobytes each. In my case, I regularly do walking, strength training, and elliptical, but only walking is on the default list, and I have to keep pushing strength training and elliptical from the app to the watch. Very poor user experience here.
Also, the buggy syncing loses data here. I tracked a 2-hour strength training session on the watch alongside my Pixel Watch 2 for comparison, which I can’t show since it never made it to the app. Only 3 walking sessions are recorded in the app at all, out of at least 10 different activities during the week I tested the watch.
I found, however, that the step counter and calorie burns were a close enough match to the more expensive Pixel Watch 2 — calorie burns a bit on the higher side, but that metric always comes with a lot of caveats anyway. All in all, this watch is a decent casual activity tracker for simpler activities, but unfortunately, you might lose stats if you aren’t constantly opening the app to sync the data.
Smartwatch Features
As a smartwatch, the NX23 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: this watch doesn’t truly allow you to read your messages. Instead, it mirrors your
notifications and is thus limited by what it shows. There are some glaring omissions on the list of apps that can
be whitelisted, like Google Calendar. The
Notify for Smartwatchesapp on the Play Store can help with this. - Alarms: very poorly implemented. They cannot be created in-watch, only in-app, and unfortunately do not work reliably. I’ve set wake-up alarms that in the morning not only failed to trigger but were also disabled.
- Timers: timers can be left in the background without being discarded, but they only vibrate for some reason. They’re easy to miss as they only vibrate a handful of times.
- Bluetooth calling: found it to be unreliable. Sometimes, when receiving a WhatsApp call — which works fine on other watches — the watch would not react to tapping the answer button.
- Weather: the weather app is lacklustre, to say the least. It just gives the current conditions and a forecast for a few days of conditions and min/max temperatures.
- Find my phone / watch: works fine both ways; however, note that Bluetooth range is very limited, and the watch will often lose connection if you step out of the room the phone is in.
The app: FitCloudPro
In my usage, I found the Bluetooth connection to be stable but very short-ranged. Going into another room would often lose connection to the phone, although it was reacquired quickly once back in range.
Data sync was a mess, however. Notifications could be received reliably, but the app simply would not pull data from the watch unless you opened it and, in some cases, forced a refresh by pulling down on the home tab. This caused a lot of activity and health monitoring data to simply be lost, as mentioned a few times earlier in the review.
The cards for inspecting workouts were actually pretty good (some screenshots above), and I have no major complaints there.
When it comes to the device settings, options are very limited. Worth noting is the Wrist preference option that I
would have hoped would flip the screen upside down when wearing the watch on my right hand — if nothing else, so that
the torch could point the right way — but it didn’t seem to do anything.
It’s not a great app in general.
Conclusion
The NX23, hardware-wise, is a great budget smartwatch. It’s robust, nicely designed and well built, with a good sharp screen. The torch is superb, and the sensors are adequate for the price point. The landscape form factor makes it really comfortable to wear as well. All that goodness is unfortunately let down by substandard software, both on the watch and the app itself, which is a crying shame.
Unfortunately, these budget smartwatches are nearly never updated on the firmware side, and this is also true of the app itself, judging by the comments on the app store spanning back years.
If you can get one real cheap, it is, however, a decent casual activity tracker, and the torch makes it a really useful utility gadget to carry with you at all times.