Misfit Phase
A stylish smart(ish) watch with some elegant touches, but its simplicity can lead to frustration
Misfit Phase
With wearables, it seems you can either have the feature-packed or goodlooking definition of “smart”. The part of the Venn diagram where the two cross over is vanishingly small, especially when you add a third circle labelled “decent battery life”. The Misfit Phase attempts to square this circle: a hybrid smartwatch that looks great and has six-month battery life.
The first thing you’ll notice is that there’s no screen, just hour and minute hands that tick around the minimalist circular face of the watch. There aren’t even numbers, just lines and a tiny logo at the top. Two buttons adorn the right-hand side, but there’s no crown to set the time, as this is handled by the accompanying app.
Our model came with a comfortable leather strap, but the shape of the lugs meant that no matter how tight I pulled the straps, the watch was never flush with my wrist. That’s not a critical problem with no heart-rate monitor, but it’s a quirk all the same. The leather version costs £185, a rubbery sports-strap edition £165, but both can track swimming.
The Phase is an activity tracker first and foremost. It tracks the number of steps you’ve taken and can tell if you’re running as well. The latter is handy, but there’s no GPS so the watch can’t tell how quickly you ran a mile, just that you were moving faster than normal.
In fact, the watch itself won’t really be telling you anything. The app does the heavy lifting, with no separate dial to see your steps directly from the watch. Instead, you can see how much of your daily activity target you’ve hit by tapping the top button, at which point the minute and hour hands jump around to indicate a percentage.
It’s an elegant solution, but things fall flat when it comes to complicated phone interaction. That’s the job of the second button, but by default it can only handle one kind of input at a time. The preset functions give you a choice between tagging a physical activity, playing music, taking a selfie and advancing presentation slides. The app does let you assign functions to double, triple and long presses, but some functions can only be assigned to a long press, and this kind of setup is just asking for mis-presses.
What of notifications? There are two ways the watch lets you know your phone wants attention. The first
“The watch itself won’t be telling you anything – the app does all the heavy lifting, with no dial on the watch to track your steps”
is that it vibrates, but as that could mean anything from an urgent text message to junk email arriving, the watch offers you a clue in the form of a colour-coded circle at the bottom of the watch face.
The idea is that you set a specific colour to a certain kind of notification, so you can immediately tell if the buzz relates to a WhatsApp message or a fitness notification. You can even assign a contact to a number on the face, so the hands will point to that number when they text or call. It’s clever in theory, but I could never remember which colour corresponded to what kind of notification. Perhaps more important, however, is that if I glance at an Apple Watch and see an email has arrived, I immediately know who it’s from and can judge as whether to grab my phone and respond. With the Misfit Phase, I’m told it’s an email, but I have no idea as to whether it’s my girlfriend, manager or the lawyer of a late Nigerian prince.
Finally, there’s sleep tracking. This is detected automatically based on movement, and Misfit breaks down your night into “awake”, “light sleep” and “restful sleep”. It did a good job of detecting when I was sleeping and correlating my night-wriggling to how well rested I felt – plus the six-month battery (a coin battery that’s easy to replace) means no overnight charges.
Think about the problems you have with smartwatches right now, and the Misfit Phase ticks off almost all of them. However, this is a closer relative of the Fitbit Flex 2 than the Apple Watch. If you’re after a basic fitness tracker, that isn’t a bad thing. Just accept that when your watch buzzes it’s time to pick up your phone for closer examination.