Kumi GW5 Smartwatch Review – Is This Budget Smartwatch for You?

The Kumi GW5 Smart Watch allows you to integrate into a technologically immersive world without ever taking your phone out of your pocket. With up to a week of battery life and IP68 waterproofing, you’ll hardly ever have to take it off your wrist.

We’ll review the reasons for buying a GW5 Smart Watch based on my actual user experience. We will also explore the intangibles such as ease of setup, use, and aesthetics to help you decide if this budget smartwatch is for you.

Kumi GW5 as a Watch

This product is a fully functional watch with reasonable comfort and aesthetics. The 1.39-inch high-definition large screen is easy to read, so you’ll always know the time when you look at your wrist, which is the traditional reason you wear a watch. However, with functions like integrated weather, stopwatch, and timer, it goes beyond what you’d expect from a conventional watch.

The silicon band is durable and comfortable but prone to getting sweaty after exercise and in high humidity. It’s not terribly stylish, but you can customize your watch face with hundreds of selections from the app so your watch can still make a statement.

Kumi GW5 Wellness Monitoring

Wellness monitoring is a rising demand for smartwatches, especially for people with health conditions. At a top level, the Kumi GW5 will continually monitor sleep and heart rate. It will also measure blood oxygen and blood pressure on demand.

The large screen size and easy integration with the app make these features even more helpful; it will automatically save a wellness log. More data allows you to make better health decisions over time. Also, there are wellness apps, like breathing exercises and sedentary alarms, that will help you meet your wellness goals.

Kumi GW5 Sport Modes

Wellness monitoring and exercise are what I got my smartwatch for. The wellness monitoring was everything I could ask for—the exercise modes… not so much. Here are my three issues:

1) Step counter not integrated with other exercises. The watch has literally hundreds of exercise modes, including diving. I say diving because it’s an odd choice, considering the IP68 waterproofing is only good down to a depth of 1.5 meters, so it’s not a dive watch by any standard. 

Moving on, I want to see all my exercises collated in a way that is equal between modes of exercise. For instance, today, I rode a 50-mile bike ride in 4.5 hours that allegedly burned 4462 calories (we’ll get to that next). My step counter is only at 951, well below my goal. However, if I ride a half-century, I think I got my steps in for the day. Moreover, as a general rule of thumb, one hour of cycling is roughly equivalent to 10,000 steps, and with a heart rate monitor in the loop, I would have expected a more refined estimate.

2) The calorie counter seems high. The Kumi smartwatch credited me with burning 4462 calories on my ride, while the Strava estimate is 2,145. I had a similar discrepancy on other rides, including a local mountain bike ride, where my smart watch credited 793 kcal for a 36-minute ride, and Strava credited 320 Cal. In both cases, the watch was more than twice the Strava estimate.

3) The heart rate monitor doesn’t connect well to outside apps. I believe that caloric estimates with heart rate monitors should be more accurate, but my mountain bike ride had an estimated burn rate of over 1,300 calories/hour. With my body weight of 100 kg, 60 minutes of regular mountain biking activity can burn an average of 825 kcal. On more challenging rides, uphill mountain bike riding has a burn rate of 1360 kcal/hour, and competitive riding burns 1554 kcal/hour. I wasn’t riding uphill the whole time and wasn’t at a race pace, so the watch estimate feels high. That being said, I wish I could have integrated the heart rate monitor into Strava, but I gave up after 10 minutes of trying. It never would recognize the device.

Even with these issues, it’s handy to have a single device to track your workouts on. There’s also a hope that these measurements will get more accurate the better the device knows my baseline. Finally, the heart rate profile was super helpful in knowing when I was at max output and planning that into my workout strategy.

Kumi GW5 as a Life Assistant

Let’s get this out of the way. It’s super cool to have a watch linked to your phone. Taking and receiving calls from your wrist makes you feel like a special agent. However, unless you’re already leading a digitally integrated lifestyle or want to start, these features will just be novel but not really used. And if you’re taking a lot of calls or texts, you probably don’t want to do it off your watch anyway.

However, the ability to give and receive payments from your wrist and unlock NFC-keyed doors would be incredible if that’s already part of your lifestyle. 

Here’s the check. Think of all the times you pull your phone out of your pocket during the day and ask yourself if you’d rather do that with your watch. If so, the Kumi GW5 life assistant features could be for you.

Wrapping up my Kumi GW5 Smartwatch Review

I loved the wellness monitoring and intuitive setup of my new GW5 Smartwatch. Downloading the app and pairing it with my phone was super easy, and all the functions are easy to read and understand.

The sports modes decidedly underwhelmed me. It was easy to record and log data, but I gravitated back to the wellness apps on my phone because of their increased functionality.

I also liked many of the life assist features, but found myself gravitating back to my phone. Having weather on my watch is nice, but I want to see the hour-by-hour forecast. Having texts on my wrist is nice as well, but my other messaging apps aren’t integrated, so I kept checking my phone anyway.

The bottom line is that if you’re looking for a new smartwatch, the Kumi G5 is a solid choice—the features work as promised with easy, glitch-free integration at an affordable price-point. However, smartwatches aren’t for everyone, and there aren’t enough features on the Kumi G5 to make it a universal “must-have.”