Where to buy? Banggood.
Haylou Solar LS05 is a smartwatch that stands out for its beauty, and also for being manufactured by a company with a good reputation, which produces fine audio products.
The first thing that came to my mind when I took it out of the box was: yes, it’s really beautiful. The external build gives a sense of durability and resembles models from Amazfit, a famous chinese smartwatch brand. It’s also very comfortable on the wrist. Even if you look closely, there are no details that identify this one as a cheap item. But it is cheap: costing something between 30 and 40 dollars, the LS05 can compete even with popular smartbands.
The round screen is 1.28 inches and has a relatively low resolution (240×240), although there’s a good LCD panel, with super strong colors and no image distortion when viewed sideways. It’s a display that makes a good impression for being vibrant, but it’s still important to notice that when you need to read a notification on it, there will be small and pixelated fonts, impairing the reading experience a little bit.
The operating system doesn’t accept the installation of additional apps, but it has a pleasant UI and somewhat smooth animations. Also, responsiveness to touch is good. I like the widgets that appear when you swype to the sides, which show useful information and are easy to view.
Despite being fast, the watch can still improve in that regard. The “lift the wrist to wake the screen” feature, for example, sometimes takes 3 seconds to activate, or even demands the gesture to be repeated. On other occasions, when you press the home button to directly turn on the display, the process can take long 2 seconds.
Regarding activity measurements, Haylou Solar does a decent job, but it still loses to some recent competitors. When I slept with the watch and a Mi Band 5 in the same wrist, by morning time the Solar had registered a number of false steps, and this hardly happened with the Mi Band.
One last point I was not entirely satisfied with is actually the main one: the application it uses to sync with smartphones, called Haylou Fit, has a good interface, but it’s way too simple. Some popular options are missing, such as the ability to download new watchfaces, and there will be no integration with famous communities (i.e. Strava) or smart devices, just like it’s delivered by bigger competitors. Anyway, at least Haylou Fit is compatible with iPhone and Android.
For the rest, we have a whole set of standard functions: notifications, music control, heart rate measurement, chronometers and more. There is no blood oxygen measurement or GPS. The watch is resistant to sweat and rain, which provides good protection, although it’s not recommended to dip it in water.
What resumes Haylou Solar’s operation is the fact that it’s pretty straight and basic. The most popular information is present, but without extras. When you receive text notifications, for example, you can only view their first lines, not the entire message. Just as you can’t answer messages over the watch, but that’s fine, since it will happen only in the most advanced models.
Battery is pretty good. With brightness at around 60%, constant heart rate measurement and lots of actitity monitoring, I got around 16 days of autonomy. This is great for a watch with a big and shiny screen.
In the end, I like Haylou Solar for being beautiful and well built, while it still does the basics with some efficiency. As smartwatches are also fashion items, I believe that beauty is an important aspect to be considered, and I recommend it to anyone who focuses on that.
But for those who want something more mature, with a well-established ecosystem, in the same price range there are good options such as Xiaomi’s Mi Band 5 (you can buy it here) or Huawei’s Honor Band 5 (here). Maybe their visual won’t attract the same attention, but they will do more.