Haylou LS02 Review

The Haylou LS02 is a budget-priced smartwatch, touting up to 20 days of battery life, sports tracking and constant heart rate monitoring with the optical sensor. But for less than £40, undercutting the competition from Fitbit and Apple, is the price too good to be true?

Video Review

Design

Haylou LS02

See Price on Amazon

The Haylou LS02 features a simplistic and pleasant design for a smartwatch, with a squarish shape and flat sides. The smartwatch has plastic construction, which can be expected for a budget product, this keeps the watch lightweight and the price tag affordable.

The top of the watch is home to the 1.4-inch touchscreen LCD, the display is clear, although it can be difficult to see in direct sunlight. The display is covered by a tempered glass surface to keep it protected and, as it is a glass surface and not plastic, should be far less prone to damage from scuffs or scratches. The display is quite small in the top glass area, however, and you can clearly see where the display ends and there are some fairly chunky bezels surrounding it.

Looking around the sides of the watch, which has a dark grey finish, the sides are bare aside from a single button for waking the watch from sleep, the button can also be held down as a shortcut to bring up the list for selecting an exercise to track. In addition, the watch straps also connect on the top and bottom sides and are also removable if you wish to swap from the included watch strap to a different one or wish to give it a thorough clean.

The included watch strap feels nice and is comfortable to wear, although after using the Nike Sport Loop with my Apple Watch for a year or so now, I much prefer the loop-style and feel – but that’s my personal preference for wearables in general.

The underside of the watch is where we can find the optical heart rate sensor which will constantly take readings of your heart rate, this feature can be turned off if you wish to save some battery life, however. Also, on the underside, is the magnetic charging connector which connects securely to the charging cable but is still easy to remove.

Wearing the watch throughout the day is comfortable and the design accommodates that well. It’s lightweight and a good size to fit on my wrist, with the whole watch being a little smaller than my 42mm Apple Watch, so I can use it when I need to, but it also stays out the way when I don’t.

Software

The software experience on the Haylou LS02 is fairly basic, the watch has its own software and doesn’t use anything as feature-packed as Wear OS or watchOS. The watch supports five different watch faces to pick from, this is the extent of the possible customisability for the watch, unfortunately, the faces themselves aren’t customisable and you can’t change the colours, for example. It would be nice to see some more customisability available in a software update or future version of the watch.

Navigating the interface is straightforward, swiping side to side will reveal different information such as your metrics for the day, heart rate or sleeping time as well as the weather and breathing exercises. Swiping down from the top will reveal some quick settings toggles and swiping up from the bottom will reveal the software features. The menus are a little slow to scroll through, but you get used to how the menus behave after a couple of days of use.

The smartwatch also has a companion app to sync to your smartphone, on iOS it can also add the data it records into the Health app. Like the watch, the smartphone app is straightforward and presents your step, workout, heart rate and sleeping data that has been recorded by the watch.

You can also start a workout from the app which will record GPS data from your phone and combine it with the metrics from the watch, the watch lacks a GPS so if you want location data with your workouts, you’ll need to use the smartphone app.

Additionally, you can also customise some of the watch settings such as notification features and time formatting, as well as resetting and updating the watch.

Features and Performance

As mentioned earlier during the review the Haylou LS02 features a heart rate monitor which is constantly reading your heart rate. I found the accuracy of the sensor to be a bit of a mixed bag, in comparison to my Apple Watch Series 3 which I trust to give me accurate readings during my exercise.

The sensor works well when I’m not partaking in a workout, and manages to do ambient readings somewhat accurately, but when I am doing a workout the readings do not seem to match my Apple Watch at all, or how I am feeling during the workout. The sensor typically will end up reading out a heart rate that is much lower than what it should be reading when compared to my Apple Watch. As a result, this completely throws off the calories burned metric and makes me feel like I can’t trust the readouts which it is displaying, which is a real shame.

The watch still counts your steps and tallies it up to calculate a walking distance, which I think, as a result of the heart rate inaccuracies, makes this watch more suited for as it does a good job of counting steps.

The watch features an IP68 waterproof rating, so the watch can get wet, and you can also wear the watch during a sweaty workout without any worries.

The watch also features a sleep-tracking mode, unfortunately, I can’t sleep that comfortably when wearing a watch, so I’ve not been able to try out this feature myself. The watch is also able to pass through phone notifications straight onto your wrist, so you can easily check them from your wrist.

Battery Life

Haylou claims you can get up to 20 days of battery life on the LS02. From my testing, I’ve found that the watch will lose around 10% battery a day with the heart rate sensor constantly working in the background, so you should expect to get just over a week of use from the watch before needing to charge again from typical regular usage – but I could see this meeting the 20 days by turning off some features.

When it comes to charging up the watch, it charges up quickly using the included magnetic charging cable.

Conclusion

The Haylou LS02 is a promising smartwatch that unfortunately, from my experience with the product, falls short at its most important job of tracking workouts. If you’re a fitness fanatic you’re probably better off saving up for a Fitbit, which should do a better job at more accurately reading your metrics such as heart rate.

However, if you’re looking for a budget smartwatch to track steps and your resting heart rate throughout your day and deliver your phone notifications to your wrist, I still think the Haylou LS02 is a product that could deliver on those aspects.

The Haylou LS02 smartwatch is available to purchase on Amazon.