Dizo Watch R Talk review: affordable, accurate, and appealing

Should you buy the Dizo Watch R Talk? Let's find out in this review

• By Ashish Kumar -
Published On: September 27, 2022

The Dizo Watch R Talk is among the first Bluetooth-calling smartwatches from Realme's Techlife ecosystem brand Dizo. The smartwatch is priced in India at under Rs 5,000 and offers a lot more than just the calling feature. The Dizo Watch R Talk comes with a host of fitness features, including 110+ sports modes, SpO2 monitor, sleep tracking, and a 24/7 heart rate monitor. The wearable also supports 150+ watch faces and is rated to last up to 10 days on a single charge. Wondering how the device performs in real life? Read our Dizo Watch R Talk review to find out.

The lowdown

• The Dizo Watch R Talk sports a circular dial in a stainless steel frame, which exudes premiumness, but at what cost? The frame pushes the watch's weight up to 61 grams, making it slightly uncomfortable to wear. I found myself taking the watch off every couple of hours to give my wrist some rest. Be that as it may, the watch is sturdy and IP68 certified against water (up to 1.5m for 30 minutes) and dust. This means you can hit the gym with the smartwatch and even take it for a quick shower or swim.
• The watch is paired with 22mm silicone straps, which don't itch or bite. The straps also come with quick-release pins so you can swap them out and change the look of the watch on the go. Additionally, the Dizo Watch R Talk sports a built-in microphone just below the right edge, which houses a couple of physical buttons and a speaker. The buttons protrude from the watch slightly and won't bite your wrist. The charging pins are at the rear panel of the case, where you can also find all the other sensors.

• The Dizo Watch R Talk sports a 1.3-inch display with 7H glass that should prevent scratches to some degree. The display is a visual treat, with sharp, punchy, and vibrant colours. It's an AMOLED panel that supports 360x360p resolution and 500 nits of brightness. The latter makes the screen legible even under direct sunlight. In fact, the display is so bright that it would light up a dark room for me even with low brightness. I had to turn off the raise-to-wake gesture, which by the way works perfectly fine, on nights when I went to bed wearing the watch. I wish there was a night mode on the watch that would automatically turn off the screen while you are sleeping. Also, I found the viewing area of the display to be relatively small, and I think Dizo could have gone with a bigger screen by getting rid of those bulky bezels. This would have made the overall watch usage even better. That said, the wearable comes with an always-on-screen option, which allows you to set a digital or analogue clock as the display. However, this will greatly increase the power consumption and my advice would be to keep this feature off.

• The Dizo Watch R Talk offers respectable battery life without the always-on-screen. The wearable lasted me a solid seven days, if not the claimed 10 days, with 20-40 percent brightness and pretty much every setting enabled including the continuous heart rate sensor, SpO2, sleep monitoring, and intermittent voice calls. The battery life is further extendable through battery saver mode which disables everything except the time and battery display. The charger provided inside the box is capable of fully juicing up the Dizo Watch from 0-100 percent in about two hours.
• Moving on, the Dizo Watch R Talk comes with a Bluetooth voice-calling feature, which works as advertised. As long as the watch is paired with your smartphone via Bluetooth, you can answer or reject and even make calls from the watch itself. While it is not a new feature, the implementation is pretty good and reliable. I was comfortably able to place a call in a not too noisy environment using the Watch R Talk. Dizo claims that the watch uses a noise cancellation feature, which helps eliminate unwanted noise to further enhance the calling experience. While the speaker is not loud, it gets the job done.

• The Dizo Watch R Talk offers a familiar UI, which is quite comfortable to use. A simple swipe left or write will give you options for steps, calories burnt, distance covered, heart rate, sleep monitoring, music control, and other functions. A swipe down from the home screen draws a notification panel for emails and messages including WhatsApp, while a swipe up gives you workout controls along with an alarm clock, stopwatch, timer, camera, SpO2, female health, settings, and more. The physical buttons on the watch can be used to go back or jump to the home screen and access various sports modes. The Dizo R Talk supports 110+ sports modes, including outdoor/ indoor runs, outdoor/ indoor walks, cycling, mountaineering, swimming, cricket, basketball, and free training. As many as 11 workout modes are saved in the watch, while the remaining can be accessed via the compatible Dizo app for iPhone and Android.

• The Dizo app is available for download on devices Android 5.0 or above and iOS 10 or later. The app offers a quick QR-based pairing and a clean and minimalistic UI. You will be able to find what you are looking for quite easily. Also, the app effortlessly connects and auto-syncs the data from the watch. While the app is good, I believe there are a few areas where it can improve. I would like to see the app adapt to system-wide settings, offer more options to control the watch, and ability to run watch face synchronisation in the background. The Dizo Watch R Talk supports over 150 watch faces, out of which only five can be stored on the watch and accessed through a long press on the screen, while the rest can be downloaded from the app. The latter takes around 2-3 minutes to sync during which both the app and the watch are rendered useless.

• Coming to the meat of the matter, the Dizo Watch R Talk does a great job tracking your vitals including heart rate, SpO2, and step tracking. The watch added bare minimum ghost steps, which wasn't the case with the smartwatches I have reviewed so far. The wearable's sports mode also worked just fine; however, I would have liked a quick summary of my activities post-workout on the watch, before jumping to the home screen, instead of checking the app on my smartphone for the same. The watch also comes with sleep tracking, but for some reason, I didn't find it accurate. It would either show extra or sometimes fewer hours than I actually slept for. That said, this seems to be a software issue, which Dizo can fix with an update. While the Watch R Talk doesn't have a built-in GPS, it can quickly latch on to your smartphone's location, which works just fine.

• Apart from this, the Dizo Watch R Talk features female health, and breath training, along with drinking water and sedentary reminders. The watch can also mirror notifications such as messages from your smartphone, though much like any other affordable smartwatch you can't interact with them. The wearable also has a built-in vibrating motor which works for notifications and other alerts such as alarms, timers, and a stopwatch. While it is nice and dandy, I found the motor too strong for my taste even with a soft vibration. Good thing though, the Dizo Watch R Talk has the option to disable the vibration altogether.

Verdict

The Dizo Watch R Talk has a bunch of things going for it, starting with its design, which defies the watch's affordable price tag. Additionally, fitness enthusiasts will have plenty to like about the watch. The Dizo wearable is among the most accurate fitness trackers that you can find in the segment. The watch's battery life is more than decent, while Bluetooth voice calling is an added bonus. That said, I wish the Watch R Talk was lightweight and had a better screen-to-body ratio. 

All said and done, at Rs 4,999, the Dizo Watch R Talk deserves a second look for its good design and the useful features that it brings to your wrist.

Editor's rating: 3.5 / 5

Pros

• Premium and good looking
• Lovely screen
• Tracks fitness accurately
• Bluetooth calling is good and reliable

Cons

• Chunky bezels
• Bulky design
• Sleep tracking needs improvement