Ah, yes, the humble smartwatch. A device that sent my anxiety spiralling out of control with its constant vibrating and always-available attitude.
Admittedly, it’s taken me some years to get used to wearing a smartwatch again, but thanks to all the new features, specifically disabling specific phone notifications, I have once again found myself looking at what’s on the market.
The latest piece of technological jewellery on my wrist is the Astrum MT510 Smartwatch. It is an entry-level, budget-friendly watch that boasts many features. Sure, the watch may be aimed at the female market, with its thin wrist strap adorned with a flower design and beige/silver and pink/rose gold colour options, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use it. So, I did.
If you are curious, there is a men’s watch in the Astrum range too, called the MT410, with similar specs and price.
On The Box
The Astrum MT510 features a stunning 1.32-inch AMOLED display, which is bright and vibrant. It can track heart rate, steps, blood pressure, blood oxygen saturation (SpO2), sleeping, and workouts, all from the convenient location of your wrist.
Partnered with the Da Fit App, you can also track menstrual cycles, add sedentary or drink water alerts, and dive slightly deeper into your workouts and data.
Coming from a Garmin, it was nice to see all the tracking features the Astrum MT510 comes with, considering its R699 price tag.
The real question is, do all the features work?
In short, “yes, but…”
In Reality
Of course, these devices are never perfect in measuring things, and you should always go to a medical practitioner if you feel something is wrong, but they do help monitor trends, and you can show off how hard you worked at the gym to your mates.
By default, the watch has always-on heart rate tracking off. I initially assumed this was to save battery, but turning it on to scan my heart rate every 5 minutes had no impact on the battery life.
SpO2 and blood pressure are stats you’ll have to manually request the watch to measure, which is fine, and you can get into a routine of doing this every couple of days or once a week, should you need to.
Stand-up and drinking alerts also work as expected.
My only gripe here is how subtle the watch vibrates when these alerts come in. Even on its hardest setting, I sometimes thought it was just the wind blowing past my arm and missed some notifications. This went for phone messages as well.
Soft Spoken
However, phone calls won’t be missed due to the subtle vibrations for two reasons: they vibrate longer, and the watch rings out loud for you.
You can take phone calls on your watch, similar to how you can take phone calls on a Bluetooth speaker. The watch has a built-in microphone and speaker, but it’s not perfect. I was barely heard on my end and had to turn up the volume to full to hear anyone on the other end.
Weirdly enough, because of this Bluetooth speaker setup, the watch also takes over your media audio. When listening to anything on your phone, the audio will, by default, be fed to the watch. You can, and probably should, disable this from the get-go.
Workout, Reset, Don’t Workout
There is a deathly annoying flaw in the device that will hopefully be fixed with a software update at some stage. You can’t actually lock the watch from accepting any input. When working out, this can be detrimental in a few ways. You could accidentally stop the workout tracking when you don’t mean to, or, what happened in my case, make your way through the menu and completely reset the watch.
This reset resulted in setting all the settings back to default, and, in the heat of my workout, when I just restarted the tracking on the device, meant that I had managed to perform a workout on the 1st of January 2024, the default watch date.
It also meant I had to go through all the settings and set them back to how I had them. Re-enabling all-day heart rate tracking, disabling media output and reselecting the watch face I had chosen, to name a few.
Aside from this annoyance, the watch tracked my heart rate throughout the workout and notified me of the calories burned. Compared to the Garmin I had on at the same time, my average heart rate was exactly the same, while my peak was about 10 bpm lower. My calories burned were about 100 calories higher than what Garmin tracked.
Uncrowing Moment
Another gripe I have with the watch is the crown. I wear my watch on my left hand, and, unfortunately, you can’t flip the screen around. This means the crown digs into my wrist at times. This also means I accidentally press the crown down, accessing the menu’s change watch faces and, perhaps, reset the watch.
The interface is also not very intuitive when using the crown. One click takes you to the watch face, while double-clicking enters the menu. Scrolling the crown cycles through the options, but then you have to switch to tapping the screen to accept or change any settings. This makes using the crown feel worthless. I might as well just swipe and tap from the start.
Worth the Wear?
With all of this mentioned, until Astrum can come up with a fix for the watch accidentally resetting itself, it’s just too annoying to recommend. Yes, it’s a great price for a watch packed with these features, and it has enough battery life to get you around four days of wear between charges, but when a device doesn’t work as intended, these pros don’t mean much.
At the time of writing this review, the firmware version was MOY-JXQ3-2.0.0, so I’d keep an eye on any updates in the future that could lead to the Astrum MT510 being a great device for the price bracket it sits in.
