Simple Heart Rate Measuring Watch - Review

While looking for some quality heart rate monitoring watches on-line, I stumbled upon this rather cheap watch on eBay and ordered it just to try it out. The name differs: Pulse Watch, Heart Monitoring Watch etc. Price is usually under 10 GBP (15 USD) and it promises to "use optical technology to sense your blood flow through your finger."

How does it work?

I was surprised how well the watch look. The design is not bad for watch under 10 pounds and even though it looks cheap, it doesn't embarass you necessarily. What is alsa nice is the well adjusting strap, again, nothing to write home about, but didn't disappoint.

What was disappointing, however, was the pulse function, i.e. the main characteristics of this watch. It requires you to press carefully your finger to the sensor for around 15 - 20 seconds. The results seem solid enough when you are careful, but as much as walking during the measurement can give very different results. So it is quite unfit for many purposes.

Nice function is the Exercise mode, where you time how long you've been exercising and the watch then calculates how many calories you've burned, provided you've input your age, weight and type of activity. But you can easily count these on-line, like using this Calories Burned Calculator.

Few times I encoutered an inconvinient issue: when my finger was sweaty, I was not able to get the watch to measure my pulse, no matter how I tried. Of course, you often want to check your heart rate exactly when you are tired and sweaty, so this is definitelly a minus. Watch will tell you to "repeat" the measurement. Well, it is better than just telling me some random made-up value...

Overall, these watch are still good deal for the price and apt for some fitness purposes. However, I absolutely woldn't recommend them as your only watch.