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Okay, I have good news here. Black Shark is still going strong and they’re venturing into the world of “smartwatches”. Honestly, I’m quite surprised as Black Shark does have other accessories like smartphone coolers and wireless earbuds, but they want to focus on smartwatches instead.
I wore this Black Shark Watch S1 for the past week, and woooh – lemme share my experience with you because it’s going to be an interesting one.
Okay, the box of this watch is very Black Shark-like. Once we opened it up, we have the watch, the charger, and the user manual which lists out all the specs of the watch.
I’m going to just show you here as I didn’t actually pay much attention to it.
Now, when I first saw this watch, I immediately said “wow” because this watch really looks sleek. So sleek that I wish many other smartwatch brands made this kind of minimalist clean design. But then, I realized – hey, Black Shark is first and foremost a gaming smartphone brand and their phones always have some “gamery chuunibyo look” to it. The watch… doesn’t have any of those gamer look.
The straps can also be swapped out easily and it seems to be using 22mm width straps. I can’t confirm this since there is no documentation.
The screen is really nice-looking, honestly. It’s a 1.43-inch rounded AMOLED screen. It also curves outwards and that, I think, further accentuates its elegance. I just like how it looks.
It also has one crown that does have a rotating wheel and another button. We’ll talk about their functionalities later. This watch also has two microphones – one on each side – and it acts like a relay for the phone’s smart assistant. In my case, since I am using it with the Galaxy Z Fold 5, it will use Bixby instead. There is no way to change it to Google Assistant.
I don’t know if this is the case if you pair it with an HONOR phone for example – since they have their own voice assistant too.
This watch is also rated for IP68 and I think that is just a necessity for this day and age.
So, in terms of the features available on this watch, we’ll have to pair it with a phone. The pairing process is just… Well, let me factory reset the watch to show you.
Yes, that is the entire factory reset process. It looks like nothing has happened, and the watch will immediately gather your heart rate data, stress level, sleep data, and all of the other data the moment you wear the watch. Yes, those things work even before you pair the watch with the Shark Wear app.
The pairing process is easy enough. Just open up the app, scan the QR code of the watch – which is actually your watch’s MAC address – and it is immediately paired.
The app itself doesn’t offer much in terms of value. First, presents a dashboard of all the data gathered by the watch. We have the heart rate, blood oxygen level, sleep data which we’ll talk about it later, stress level monitoring, and weight data is something that we have to key in ourselves. It’s obviously not automatic.
We also have a few sports to select from so that the watch can start tracking our exercises. Pressing the watch’s button also brings us the same menu, but the watch has a lot more exercises than the app? Why?
Then, we can customize the watch faces and there are many to select from. We can also customize our own but it’s rather limited either way.
I also don’t understand the purpose of this spinning crown on the watch. Its functionality is just not consistent, in my opinion. We can spin the crown to go through the list of items in the settings menu easily, but if we spin it in the home screen, it changes the watchfaces. Why?
As you can see, the animations here are at a very low frame rate which I don’t blame them since this is a low-powered device with a battery that can last for weeks with a single charge.
The charger is also magnetic and rather sleek too.
Back to app – the settings here are very straightforward and I configured everything using the app instead of on the watch itself.
I also want to talk about the quick settings menu. These icons don’t actually tell what they do. Like this moon icon here. Whenever I activate it, this other icon with the hand will be disabled. I can’t pinpoint what these buttons do.
This watch also doesn’t seem to log sleep data reliably. So let me tell you a story. This is my second unit of the Black Shark Watch S1. The first unit I got didn’t log any sleep data at all even after a few days and I have no idea why. I contacted them and they immediately swapped one for me – thanks so much for that. They told me that the returned unit had no issues.
So I wore this new unit for a few more days and managed to capture some data. Some, because it still doesn’t work reliably. It seems like I need to manually press this moon icon and go to sleep so that it actually logs my sleeping data? I don’t know. I wear the watch very tightly on my wrist when I sleep, by the way.
We can also make the watch become a speaker by tapping on this button – which I have no idea why.
This button is to adjust the brightness of the watch and from what I can find, there is no auto brightness feature on this watch. I was blinded many times when the watch accidentally detected a flick and the screen turned on while I was going to sleep.
Speaking of that, this watch does have the “raise to wake” and vice versa feature, but it doesn’t work that well when I’m lying down. Perhaps a software update can improve on this.
Notifications are also kind of rough as scrolling is stuttery and there is absolutely no emoji support so someone can send me a blank message. There is also no way to reply to messages – not even quick presets.
Let’s not forget that the vibration is quite bad. I can only hear the vibration but not feel it. And that means I constantly miss my notifications.
Should you buy the Black Shark Watch S1?
Okay, so is this Black Shark Watch S1 any good and is it worth the price of RM299? I’ll say… it is obviously affordable. Watches from brands like Xiaomi and Amazfit are priced higher than this.
If you want a watch that tells time but also “vibrates” when a notification comes in while looking sleek at the same time, this is a rather good option, honestly.
But then I have to remind everyone once again – this is not a smartwatch despite what Black Shark says it is. This Black Shark Watch S1 is a fitness band because if you think about it, this is like one of those Xiaomi Band but made circular.
It also uses proprietary software, unlike the proper smartwatches that are using Google’s WearOS. That also means we can’t install apps like Facer or Timeflik for more custom or more sophisticated animated watchfaces.
So overall, for the price of RM299, I think this is an okay product, but you need to know what you’re getting before purchasing it. Manage your expectations.
I really do hope Black Shark continues with their phones as I know many of us really love them – and I really don’t want ROG Phone to be the de facto recommended gaming smartphone brand.
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