How would you like a fitness tracker that doesn’t require a smartphone or other device to get the most out of it with? Most people would say: “well, that would be a simple pedometer strapped to your shoe or waist somewhere,”– but this doesn’t have to be the case. What if you wanted more than just a pedometer and would prefer the watch design with everything built in? Minus the complicated menus, charging of batteries and syncing you get with today’s smartwatches.
A great option for this would be the Zone R420 by LifeTrak. A fitness tracking watch, that looks and acts like a watch. There isn’t anything complicated about it. It doesn’t deliver your text messages, make phone calls, browse the web, snap pictures, record your thoughts, teleport you across town or cook your breakfast. It simply gives you the time and date while tracking your days activities and your night’s sleep progress, all while giving you on-demand access to your heart rate.
The Zone R420 features a simplistic design with a watch face that has a black dot matrix display that will look more than familiar to you. Similar to the Casio watches that have been around for what seems like forever. There are only three push-to-trigger buttons on the right side of the face that control everything and the band is made from a soft, stretchy and quite comfortable silicone material. The one they sent us has a three color-tone approach, including a mostly gray coverage, with red on the back of the band and a silver accent around the watch face (and the rear cover).
At first it looks like a basic digital watch with a nice selection of colors to it (it’s meant to look “sporty”). Until you start playing with it. It can track your daily steps, distance and calories burned and monitor you during workouts. It can also track your sleep every night so that you can get an idea of what you really get out of those 8 hours you “think” you’re getting.
All of these features are controllable via the 3 buttons. You don’t “need” to connect a smartphone or tablet to it in order to set everything up and read your data. It is all displayed on your screen for the current day’s stats. It isn’t until you want to read further into it and look at days past, that you have to bring a phone or tablet into the mix. Still, if you don’t need that information and are happy with what’s going on for the day, then you’re set.,
Syncing it to your phone, allows you to see a little more detailed information such as the sleep quality that you are getting, view trends and share the information between the LifeTrak app and iOS or Android’s health app (allowing you to centralize any information you collect if you use multiple trackers or are already using those apps).
The Zone R420 can store up to a week’s worth of data and the app can look far beyond that. Since the watch can store a week’s worth, this means you don’t have to sync it daily. You can get away with doing it only once a week. This will save battery life even more.
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Currently it only supports the iOS and Android operating systems, so this leaves Windows Phone/Tablet users outside in the rain for now. Hopefully they will consider touching on this in the near future.
Moving back to battery life. As I mentioned earlier, there is no charging. No USB ports or wireless chargers needed. The watch runs off of a normal cell battery (like a normal watch). As long as you aren’t syncing it every 10 minutes and looking for your heart rate just as often, it will supposedly last up to a year on a single battery. Since the price of cell batteries are so low, this qualifies for the term of being “epic”. Now if you do make use of the mentioned features all the time as you continuously play with it, assuming that kind of thing maintains the entertainment value that you seek out of life; it will most likely not last a full year. This is pretty neat though as most of us know the annoyances of having cables running all over to charge our devices at the end of the day.
So let’s take a look at the buttons! The buttons the buttons the buttons!!
The top button brings you to your work out screen and history. You can track your workout and then take a look at your hourly or daily history to compare and contrast (or reminisce). The history screens can be controlled with the other two buttons (once on the screen). The middle button moves between stats (sleep, distance, calories, steps) and the bottom button allows you the switch the hour or day (it begins with the current day’s data).
If you hold the top button down, it will bring you to the settings screen where you can set your goals (ie, how many steps you want to take each day, or hours you’d like to sleep), the time/date information and your user profile (gender, birth date, weight, height, etc).
The middle button (from the home/time screen) switches between the data being displayed under the time. This includes the four types of data that it collects: sleep, distance, calories and steps. If you hold the button down while wearing it on your wrist (wearing it should be obvious, but still feels necessary to point out), it will trigger the heart rate screen to start collecting information. It is on demand, so once you let go, it stops. This is to save battery life more than anything I’m sure.
The bottom button switches between two time display formats. One includes just the time and the other includes the time, date, day, AM/PM and seconds. If you hold this button down, it triggers the sync progress between the watch and your phone or tablet.
Now that wasn’t too confusing right? Like I said, no teleportation, no breakfast…no text messages or email.
It really is like having a pedometer jammed into a watch with a basic watch face and a super long battery life (with the bonus of sleep tracking). As for the sleep tracking, in our video below, we mentioned about trigger the sleep mode. This actually isn’t the case as it only displays the sleep information on your screen. There is no enabling the tracking because it does it automatically. It is supposed to automatically detect when you are sleeping and when you wake up. This way, you aren’t bothered with anything before bed. You simply just go to bed and forget about it all. Of course, once again, you do have to make sure you are wearing it on your wrist.
Is it accurate? Everything seems to be pretty accurate. The sleep tracking doesn’t match up to other devices we have tested with it, but they also don’t match up to each other either. The smartwatches did come close to each other’s information in a way and the Zone R420 seemed to think you received a LOT more rest than the others reported. So this makes it hard to say without using generalization vs science to point out that one of these results doesn’t look like the others.
The rest of the information seems accurate enough. At least compared to any normal pedometer. It doesn’t have GPS built into it (imagine the short batter life you’d get if it did have GPS), so it really is going by the motion of steps more than anything. We didn’t find anything to argue with here.
It is also waterproof up to 90 feet, so it should easily take a day worth of snorkeling lessons and basic diving. A bonus of not having any open ports (ie, USB). So you won’t have to worry about getting it wet unless you took it deep sea diving or dropped it off the side of a boat. This of course applies to most any watch though.
Lastly, before I close out, I’d like to point out that the band is interchangeable allowing the user to customize it by changing the colors up. Additional bands can be found on their website at LifeTrakUSA.com. The band simply slides off into two separate pieces. The watch face and surround doesn’t change, so you will have to go with a color theme that will match it (in our case, match the gray).
Our Conclusion
A simple solution for those looking to collect their fitness data without having to deal with all of the other bloatware and advanced features that are generally reserved for the techies. It’s a watch! It’s a fitness/sleep tracker! That is all! It tracks and displays what it needs to and it tells you the time. You can sync it to a phone to take the information further or just stick with the watch and keep it simple. The only thing we felt like pointing out (as con points) was the fact that it “felt” a slight bit pricey for what it does and there is no alarm. No speaker, no vibration. Just a silent watch. In our opinion, any form of watch should have an alarm on it these days. It just doesn’t feel the same without one. Beyond that, it scored pretty well with us.
 | Our Rating | Average Price* $99.99 |
*Average price is based on the time this article was published
Video:
Additional Images:
Specifications:
Heart rate:
30-240 bpm
Workout Mode:
Chronograph range: 9 hr, 59 min, 59 sec
Calorie: 0-99,999
Steps: 0-99,999 steps
Distance: 0-621.3 mi / 0-999.9 km
Time:
AM, PM, hour, minute, seconds
12/24 hour format
User Setup:
Gender: M/F
Age range: 5-99 years
Height (in/cm) range: 40-84 in / 100-220 cm
Weight (lb/kg) range: 44-440 lb / 20-200kg Step sensitivity
Battery:
Replaceable coin cell CR2032
Water Resistance:
Submersible: 30 m
Warranty:
One (1) year; excluding battery
Dimensions:
Total length with adjustable band (max): 217mm
Watch head size (diameter): 42 mm
LCD size (diameter): 27mm
Additional:
Backlight
Adjustable and durable reversible band with SureSnap Clasp locking mechanism for easy closure
Impact resistant polycarbonate lens
Reliable shock tested to 8kV Contact and 15kV Air (IEC6100-4-2)
FCC, CE, ROHS compliant
Are you a manufacturer or distributor that would like us to test something out for review? Contact us and we can let you know where to send the product and we will try it out.
- Final
