I just want something that auto tracks my fitness, shows the time, and shows notifications from my phone on a nice looking display. Everything else is bloat for me.
I use a Garmin vivomove Sport! It has a physical analog watch with a screen underneath the watch face. It tracks my steps and activities I engage in as well as shows me notifications from my phone. It has quite a lot of other options such as stress and sleep tracking as well but those are purely optional.
I've got a Mi Band 6 and I think it guesses based on activity half the time. I just sat still and shook mine about, and it reckoned I was well over 120bpm, but manually checking and it's barely over 1 beat a second. Being half or double what it should be seems pretty common.
It could be because I've got hairy monkey arms, but my wife also found it to be poor with her old FitBit (which has shockingly bad phone connectivity instead) keeping much better track of it during exercise.
It's nothing vitally important, but you probably shouldn't use it for any actual athlete stuff.
Interesting. I mean there are random spikes that are much higher than before and after, but those are only once or twice a day and I assumed those were just wrong measurements anyway.
Thing is it does have my heart rate going up a lot when I'm at the gym, even when I'm not doing anything with my arms, it could detect as activity, so I assume it at least somewhat accurately measures heart rate.
You are of course right, I don't expect Apple watch accuracy from a band for such a low price.
Ngl I have used the find my phone function a LOT on my smartwatch, and do like having google maps showing on it when I'm navigating in an unfamiliar location. I'm sure there's other features I utilise but these came to mind as being really handy.