[REVIEW] BlitzWolf BW-GTC are cheap smartwatches that you can also use to make calls. But are they really worth it?

Smartwatches BlitzWolf BW-GTC caught our attention at first glance. Price-wise they fall into the cheaper category, but functionally they beat even several-times more expensive models. Here you’ll find blood pressure measurement, blood oxygen saturation, and even a built-in speaker and microphone, so with these watches you can even make calls without having to take your phone out of your pocket.

Where to buy the BlitzWolf BW-GTC

We ordered the BlitzWolf BW-GTC smartwatches for review from the international retailer Banggood. Thanks to the well-known EU Priority Line shipping, we didn’t have to pay any additional fees on delivery.

Package contents and build quality

The BlitzWolf BW-GTC arrived in a white, flat box with green accents and the brand logo. Inside, you’ll find the watch body in a soft foam insert, the charger, and a silicone strap. The charger looks unusual at first glance. We’ll cover it in the chapter about battery life and charging.

The silicone strap is 20 mm thick and simply snaps onto the watch body. You can easily swap it for any other strap with the same width. The one included in the package is a standard, basic black strap. Dust sticks to it, and after just a week of testing you can already see signs of use.

Overall build quality is good though—the watches are lightweight yet solid. They have one physical button on the right side that turns the watch on or off. On the other side there’s a fairly large opening that looks like a SIM-card slot, but it actually houses the speaker and microphone.

BlitzWolf BW-GTC: Display and its quality

As with most other smartwatches in a similar price range, the manufacturer went with a cheaper TFT display. Its size is 1.54″ and the resolution is 240 x 240 px. So you’re getting a standard TFT display.

Most of the time, you can clearly see the boundary between the display and the watch frame around it. Since there’s no AMOLED, the display looks more dark grey than black. Occasionally you’ll notice a subtle raster, and above all the text isn’t quite as crisp. Brightness is sufficient, but you won’t find automatic brightness adjustment.

First power-on and pairing with the app

The BlitzWolf BW-GTC works with the Da Fit app, which is available for Android and iOS. After the first power-on, the watch doesn’t show any QR code—like you might be used to on other watches—but you immediately see a pre-set watch face that looks very elegant.

Pairing with the app is extremely fast and straightforward. Just register in the app, fill in basic info about yourself—such as gender, date of birth, height, and weight—and the app is ready to add the watch. At the time of writing the review, it can recognize only 2 watch models, i11 and BW-GTC. After tapping BW-GTC, the watch paired with the app right away. There was no need for any confirmation on the watch display, and no QR code scanning either.

Watch menu and features

The main menu of the BlitzWolf BW-GTC smartwatches appears by swiping on the display to the right. The menu is colorful and consists of 12-square icons displayed in a grid without any labels. Most of the symbols in the menu are clear, but not all of them. For example, the step-count icon looks more like a barbell than footprints. Similarly, the pressure measurement icon looks like a thermometer, and the leaf icon showing blood oxygen saturation measurement isn’t necessarily obvious at first glance to everyone.

All items from the menu are accessible by swiping between screens left, down, or up. This is also how you get to the quick access screen, where you can adjust brightness, turn vibration on/off, enable silent mode, see the weather, and configure settings. The screen that appears when you swipe from bottom to top contains notifications from apps.

The menu itself is very smooth and clear, and besides the mentioned icons in the main menu, we don’t have any complaints.

Nastavenie telefonovania

Perhaps the most interesting feature you usually won’t find even in much more expensive watches is the ability to make a voice call. As we mentioned in the introduction, there’s a speaker and a microphone on the side of the watch. So how does it work? Is calling through the watch actually useful? Surprisingly, yes.

This feature is originally turned off. It activates when you select the calling option from the watch menu by clicking “Turn on”. Unfortunately, on the first try it didn’t work for us, and that’s how our expectations of calling with cheap watches fell apart. The watches still kept telling us that pairing is required for calling, which we did.

We kept getting notifications from different apps, so the watches were connected to the smartphone. After some time, a window suddenly popped up on the smartphone where the watches tried to connect to the phone as a multimedia device over Bluetooth. That was the solution to our problem.

BlitzWolf BW-GTC smart watches, for the smartphone, look like a Bluetooth speaker or wireless headphones. It’s not enough to just add the watch to the app—you also need to add it among the paired Bluetooth devices for calls and audio. If you don’t want to use the calling feature, simply remove the connection in the Bluetooth settings on your smartphone.

Call with the BlitzWolf BW-GTC smartwatch

On the watch display, the calling menu is available with three items: recent calls, dial pad, and contacts. If you choose contacts, it doesn’t mean you’ll find your phone contacts here. If you want to see phone numbers for certain people, you need to add them manually to your favorites in the Da Fit app. The maximum number is 8 contacts.

You can dial a number using the numeric keypad or via the contacts you’ve added in the app. The call then starts on your smartphone as well. To our surprise, the smartphone doesn’t show who is calling. Instead, it always displays “unknown number”. We couldn’t figure out why this happens.

However, calling itself works great. The speaker output is clear, and you can adjust the volume directly on the watch. Even at the highest volume, we didn’t notice any poor sound quality. The microphone is a bit weaker, and the person you’re calling can hear you slightly quieter, but overall the impression is very good. This type of calling is genuinely very usable.

Since we had the watches paired with the phone as a device for calls and audio, it means all sounds from the smartphone were played through the watch, which is a minor downside. Ideally, after every call you should disable using the watch as a connected Bluetooth device, even though it’s a bit inconvenient.

A huge number of watch faces and watch settings

Most smartwatches offer a few different watch face designs. With such cheap watches, it’s usually up to 10, at most 20 watch faces. In a better case, you can create your own watch face, but here you usually only have the option to choose your own wallpaper, plus a very limited number of font styles.

However, the BlitzWolf BW-GTC smartwatches offer exactly 241 watch faces at the time of writing this review directly in the official app, which is an unbelievable amount. So everyone will find something they like. The best part is that new designs keep getting added to the app.

Besides watch faces, the app also includes several other options. You can turn notifications on, set an alarm, launch the camera app, customize your favorite calling contacts, update the firmware, or go to the other settings. There you’ll find, for example, a watch-finding feature, but it only lights up the watch display, which isn’t much help if you don’t know where you left the watch.

There’s also a time format setting, units, enabling an automatic quiet mode during the selected times, turning on continuous heart-rate measurement, and reset. Plus, you can enable a hydration reminder where you set how often the reminder should appear, how many reminders you want, and when they should start showing.

Last but not least, there’s also something for ladies – a reminder for the menstrual cycle with fairly detailed settings.

Heart rate, blood pressure, and SpO2 measurement with BlitzWolf BW-GTC

One of the common features of smartwatches is heart-rate monitoring. On the BlitzWolf BW-GTC, the measurement takes about 10 seconds. In the watch menu, you can then see all measured values for the current day in a graph. However, it lacks a scale, so you can basically read nothing from the graph. You can only see the time when the measurement was roughly taken, but you don’t know what the value was. You need to check it in the smartphone.

Blood oxygen saturation is given in percentages, and its measurement also takes roughly the same amount of time as the heart-rate measurement. You can see the last 7 measurements in a graph that also lacks a scale.

We were mainly curious about blood pressure measurement and its accuracy. We didn’t have high expectations, but we compared the readings with a traditional cuff blood-pressure monitor for the upper arm. We measured the pressure at the same time on the same arm, first while resting. These were the results together with the heart-rate measurements:

We took additional measurements after a short run right before each of the three measurements, so we could see whether the values change after physical exertion.

As you can see, the values aren’t very different, especially while at rest. During exertion, the inaccuracies of the smartwatch measurements show up. But even here, the graph of historical values has no scale, so you can’t read the previous values from the watch — even though you can see them in the graph. We believe this will be fixed in some future update, because in this form those graphs are basically meaningless.

Sleep duration measurement

Another common feature is tracking your sleep duration and quality. As in some other reviews, this time we wore two watches overnight, specifically Imilab KW66 and BlitzWolf BW-GTC.

We went to bed at around 22:45 and woke up at 6:00 in the morning, though we spent a few more minutes lying in bed. The BlitzWolf watch recorded sleep with a total length of 6h 36m, starting at 23:39 and ending at 6:15. Of that, deep sleep was 1h 14m and light sleep was 4h 34m. These watches also show so-called rapid eye movement (REM), which lasts 48 m.

Meanwhile, the Imilab KW66 watch measured noticeably different values. Total sleep duration was 7h 34m, starting at 22:39 and ending at 6:13. Of that, deep sleep was 5h 21m, light sleep was 2h 11m, and waking time was 2m.

The result from the BlitzWolf watch looks more accurate, because we didn’t fall asleep immediately after lying down in bed.

App and notifications

The Da Fit app deserves praise. Despite the average rating in the Google Play store, we had absolutely no issues with it. What’s more, it’s very clear and shows a lot of interesting statistics. On the main screen right away, you can see daily stats from step counting, distance covered, sleep duration, heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen saturation, and sports activities.

Each feature is clearly and colorfully separated. Weekly and monthly overviews are also available. The statistics that compare you with other app users are also interesting. For example, you’ll find out what percentage of people walk more steps per day than you, what percentage sleep longer, go to bed earlier or later, and similar things.

For notification functionality, you need to grant the Da Fit app the necessary permissions on your smartphone. Then all you have to do is choose which apps you want to receive notifications from. The list includes apps like Phone, Messages, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Skype, or Instagram. A special solution is that all the other apps are included under the item “Others”, because that way notifications are turned on for absolutely all other apps that aren’t in the list.

The alerts worked properly, and finally we didn’t get those annoying notifications about active Messenger chat headers, as is the case with many cheap watches. We also appreciate the ability to read even longer messages on the watch, because many watches only show a short part of a longer message, and we have to read the rest on our smartphone. Messages are displayed including diacritics.

Sports activity tracking

There are 8 sports to choose from, specifically: walking, running, cycling, jumping rope, badminton, basketball, soccer, and swimming. Individual sports are shown with symbols, similarly to the watch’s main menu.

For comparison, we went for a walk with a pair of watches on our wrist: Imilab KW66 and BlitzWolf BW-GTC. After finishing the activity, we compared the measured values, which were as follows:

Except for the burned calories, the tracked values were almost identical. After you end the activity, you’ll see a short summary on the watch and more detailed information in the app. Since the watches measure heart rate every minute during the active session, you’ll find these values in the app’s graph.

Runtime and charging

The BlitzWolf BW-GTC watches come with a very unusual charger in the form of a clip. You need to place it exactly on the charging pins from the underside of the watch, which is quite impractical. On the other hand, it’s unlikely that we’ll accidentally disconnect the charger if we trip over the cable. Still, we prefer magnetic chargers.

We had continuous heart-rate measurement turned on at all times, the watch was connected to the phone as a multimedia device via Bluetooth, and that’s why we managed to drain it in just a single day. We therefore recommend removing the watch from the phone’s voice Bluetooth devices when you’re not using calls through the watch. If you do that, battery life increases to 5 days. Charging from 10 % to 100 % took 2 hours and 15 minutes.

BlitzWolf BW-GTC: Final evaluation

BlitzWolf BW-GTC are truly packed smartwatches, offering a lot of features that even watches for 100 € and more often don’t have. You’ll find heart rate measurement, sleep and activity tracking, blood pressure measurement, and blood oxygen saturation.

Buy BlitzWolf BW-GTC at the best price

With the watches, you can even make full phone calls without any problems. Our only reservations are that you can’t turn off the “raise wrist to light up” display feature, which means the display also lights up during sleep at night. We also missed the option to set how many seconds the display stays active after it turns on. Still, there’s no doubt that these are the best cheap smart watches we’ve ever had the chance to try. It’s almost unbelievable that you can buy a watch with this many features for under 30 EUR.