Wellograph

The Wellograph is an activity tracker, stopwatch, pedometer and heart-rate monitor that rivals the Apple Watch in the design department. It also has one of the best fitness-tracking displays we’ve seen on a smartwatch.

It measures steps with its 9-axis pedometer. That’s more movement sensors than its rival wristband the Fitbit Surge, though it lacks that device’s altimeter, which measures your stair- or hill climbs. The Wellograph’s stopwatch helps you track distance, speed, lap times, and movement intensity.

An impressive four months of exercise sessions can be stored on the Wellograph, and you can check these out through the equally goodlooking app (compatible with iOS, Android and Windows Phone).

As you can see from the image above, the Wellograph is a fantasticlooking watch, and wouldn’t look out of place at a black tie event.

The Apple Watch is closest when it comes to good looks, but is more expensive – the entry-level model will set you back £299. While it has a wider selection of apps, it suffers from poor battery life – at less than two days, it’s weak compared to the Wellograph’s seven-day battery.

Some may find it a little too showy for jogging or working out though, and sports wristbands such as the Fitbit Surge seem better suited for exercise fanatics.

The 1.26in (168x144) display is black and white, with an integrated backlight. It knocks the running socks off even the Fitbit Surge’s screen (which looks clunky in comparison), with beautiful clock faces, activity graphs and animated pulse graphs. While it’s not as colourful as the Apple Watch’s Activity app, it’s pretty enough in white on black. You navigate via two side buttons, which is a little clunky to begin with – we’d have preferred a more swipeable touch-sensitive display.

The Wellograph is available in Silver Satin (brown leather strap), Black Chrome (black strap) and White Pearl (white strap).

Fitness wristbands need to have heart-rate monitors these days, and the Wellograph’s works well. In fact, its Tri-LED Heart Rate Sensor replicates the action of a doctor using his fingertip to feel a pulse.

What makes heart-rate monitoring more than just interesting is the ability to gauge how hard your are exercising. Wellograph calls this Cardio Time, and it can encourage you to push yourself that little bit harder.

It also measures heart-rate variability for assessing the effects of stress on your body, as well as preventing injury from overtraining.

Like Fitbit’s Charge HR and Surge, the Wellograph automatically measures your sleeping patterns and tells you how you slept: sleep time, duration and waking. While Fitbit’s wristbands are hardly noticeable at night, the Wellograph’s chunkier design isn’t comfortable to wear in bed.

Syncing

One aspect of the Wellograph experience that we found irritating was syncing with the phone app. The Bluetooth sync isn’t kept continuous as with many other trackers. The devices manufacturer believes this saves battery life, and that users need not sync so often when they can see all the info on the device’s display.

Although we understand this, we still found the process a little fiddly, even after a couple of weeks of use. To sync your Wellograph, you’ll need to turn off the Bluetooth on your phone, turn it on in the watch, turn it back on the phone and press the watch in the settings area. Then you can open the app and sync there. It’s a couple of steps too far to call this seamless.

Also, the sync requires the watch’s 210mAh battery have a 35 percent charge at the very least. The company told us that

the reason for this is to make sure the device isn’t bricked while carrying out a firmware update, or lose data during a sync. This is the same reason why you need to have your iPhone plugged in when you perform an update, but then why not require the same of the Wellograph? After all, how many times do you have to download new firmware versions?

You power-up the Wellograph using its proprietary charging dock, which connects to a power source via Micro-USB.

The Day view on the app shows 24 hours of the current day, while the Week view show seven days of the present week. If you want to look back further, you’ll need to go to the Month view where the device reveals the entire month, as well as the historical, most recent six-month trend.

At present, the app doesn’t let you look for a certain day or month’s detailed data. The company told us it will probably update this, so that you can see your previous seven days and the preceding ones, for example.

All your data is, however, still there and can be exported to other services such as Apple Health, RunKeeper, and MyFitnessPal.

The graphs and display on the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone apps are as gorgeous as on the display. You can see detailed stats analysis on Activity, Hear, Sleep, friends league, and Sessions.

One essential for fitness trackers is the ability to compete against friends, and this is possible with the Live feature. You’ll need to find friends with a Wellograph, though.

Verdict

As a very fancy, classy-looking watch that tracks your exercise and heart rate, the Wellograph is probably better suited to the more affluent, fashion-conscious wearer rather than the sporty fitness fanatic.