[Other SmartWatches] Christian Troy:
Box content

The No.1 Sun S2 comes in a square, white box. In the lower part of the box you can immediately see the smartwatch (covered with a protective plastic film on the display), next to it there's a smaller box that contains a short micro USB cable. In the upper part there is a magnetic charging dock and an instructions booklet written in English and Chinese (the watch itself supports more languages).

The smartwatch

You can buy the smartwatch in different colors, with leather or metal bands. The device itself is a bit big, and you will need a decent sized wrist / arm or you will probably look funny (you better lift! LOL). I had to adjust the metal band of my unit removing one link to fit properly on my wrist (19cm diameter).

As very fist thing I charged it and it took almost an hour for a full charge. To turn it on when it's switched off you have to keep pressed the (only) button present for a couple of seconds (the watch's crown hides a camera, so if you're going to wear the watch on the right arm it will be very awkward grabbing a picture / video).

To turn the screen on with the device in standby just press the button or configure the motion sensor to turn the display on when you lift your arm (be careful as it might use more battery this way). To shut it down keep the button pressed for a couple of seconds (it doesn't work if you are in the lockscreen to avoid an accidental shutdown).

You will be prompted with a lockscreen, simulating 3 different analog clocks. You can switch from one to the other by tapping on them (or you can do it from watch's settings).

You will notice that despite the circular dial the lockscreen won't show a perfectly rounded picture but you will miss part of it (pretty much everything on the clock that is between V and VII), similar to what happens on other smartwatches like the Moto 360.

Display resolution should be 240x240, it's OK but I wished it was a bit more high res, the touchscreen works very good but some part of the keyboard were hard to press for me (specially the return/enter key) because of the circular shape (and typing a text message is hard on every smartwatch I saw so it's not a problem of the device itself but a lack of usability of the category).

To quit the lockscreen just swipe anywhere (up, down, left or right) to access to the smartwatch's main screen that can be customized from the settings allowing you to add two icons for quick access (it defaults to phone and messaging functions).

By swiping in any direction you access to the "drawer" containing all the functions: dialer, messaging, phonebook, call logs, bluetooth settings, pending notifications, remote camera capture, anti lost (if you enable this function the smart watch will notify you when your phone loses bluetooth connection, maybe someone is stealing it... :P ), settings, pedometer, sleep monitor, sedentary reminder (something that will bug you if you don't move for some time), the qr code to download the companion apps, alarms (that are not synchronized with the one you set on your phone), calculator, audio profiles, file manager, audio player, camera, video recorder, image viewer, video player, sound recorder, heart rate measure, body temperature, ECG (practically runs the heart rate measure until you stop it), power saving (that basically just dims backlight), stopwatch and UV measure (that doesn't work at all as it shows "normal" for both inside in the shade and outside under 2pm August sun).

Jeez, that's a lot of functions, isn't it? Well, I think that most of them are there just to impress and will rarely be used because of a poor implementation.

Let's make some examples: the smartwatch is advertised as being able to reproduce music by putting media files on its internal storage, cool, but there's just a tiny problem... you have 506 kB (yes, kilobytes) of storage available... maybe you can listen to a ringtone in a loop :). Once paired your smartwatch with your phone you will be able to use it as a bluetooth speaker though... but I really doubt that anyone is going to use this function as phone's speakers will probably be better.

The camera is a 0.3 megapixels one and saves 240x240 pictures of approximately 50 kB size (yay, you can save up to 10 pictures!). Its quality is something that I had not seen from 90s webcams. I couldn't try video recording for obvious reasons... there is no space to save the video and it will stop recording after a couple of seconds.

The pedometer and the heart rate monitor are pretty accurate but they have another problem... they must be turned on! The device won't save these data unless you turn them on, and you can't leave the pedometer grabbing data in the background while you keep using other functions of the smartwatch... that makes it a useless fitness tracker.

The sound recorder works nicely and I really liked it, it recorded my voice loud and clear and you can use it for taking notes.

In the settings section you can configure quite some things, just notice that in this section the smartwatch itself is called "phone" (like "phone settings" that refer to smarwatch's settings), at least in the english localization.

Security settings will allow you to set a password to lock your smartwatch.

In the main settings you will be able to adjust time and date (but you can let the smartwatch synchronize them with your phone); schedule up to two timers for powering the smartwatch on or off (similar to the setting present in Mediatek phones); change UI and writing language (there is support for English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Turkish, Russian and Chinese); customize the home screen, the lockscreen and the display (you can choose between some predefined static wallpapers or you can load your own by putting it in the smartwatch's internal storage and selecting it); configuring the motion sensor to mute incoming calls or alarms and set a wake-up gesture (lifting your arm); set the display timeout (from 5 til 60 seconds) and backlight brightness.

The battery will last for the whole day, obviously depending on your use, settings and amount of notifications but the average user should easily make it through a whole work day.

Android companions apps

The smartwatch uses a proprietary OS (it's not Android Wear) and it requires a companion app to be able to communicate with the phone. From the settings you can scan the QR code using your phone or you can just access to this website.

Take my two cents and don't waste time with Fundo Companion as it will drain your battery very fast if you have GPS turned on as it tries to use it all the time when the app is running and there's no option to disable it. This app should synchronize with the smartwatch and allow you to see fitness statistics (like Mi Fit's ugly brother...) but you really won't miss much if you just avoid it.

Install, instead, BT Notification and pair the devices so you will be able to send text messages (if you are brave enough to type them on that small screen), make and answer to phone calls using your smartwatch as a bluetooth headset (this should work according to other users' reports but it didn't work for my JiaYu S3S running Android 4.4.4), control your phone's camera from your smartwatch (useless for me) and, the most important function, accessing to notifications.

This part of the app is very nice and allows you to select for which apps sending notifications to your smartwatch; or you can leave all of them enabled and just block the one that you don't want to bother you.

There's a (handy?) function to locate the smartwatch in case you can't find it.

Conclusions

This smartwatch tries to do many things, maybe too many of them; I think it would be better doing fewer things but do them great.

Anyway, if you are interestead in giving smartwatches a trial but don't wanna invest too much money in them and, specially, one of the main reasons you want a smartwatch is to have quick access to notifications, then you should really consider buying a No.1 Sun S2 as notifications is where this device really shines; just consider that it uses Bluetooth 3.0 and will result in an higher battery impact on your phone compared to a Bluetooth 4.0 smartwatch.

I wanna thank GearBest once again to let me try this device and write this review.