Letsfit Smartwatch (ID205L) review

It's not the most incredible smartwatch you've seen. But it's also not the worst. And you have to admit that the Letsfit Smartwatch ID205L definitely looks like it costs more than $36. 

This budget-friendly smartwatch features a built-in heart rate monitor, notification support for everything from incoming phone calls to Snapchat, and is actually slimmer and more lightweight than its high-end counterpart, the Apple Watch Series 6. I wouldn't say it's a game-changer—it's still a $36 smartwatch, not a $399 Apple flagship product—but as I discovered during my Letsfit Smartwatch review, if you're just looking for casual fitness tracking and basic features, the ID205L might be one of the best cheap smartwatches for you.

Letsfit Smartwatch ID205L review: Price and availability

The Letsfit Smartwatch ID205L is available for $36. You can get it with one of six color variations: black with black case, dark blue with black case, light pink with rose gold case, emerald green with rose gold case, purple with rose gold case, and turquoise green with turquoise case.

Letsfit Smartwatch ID205L review: Design and specs

The Letsfit Smartwatch ID205L looks like the Apple Watch. Well, it looks like any number of private label Apple Watch wannabes on Amazon right now: A rectangular case with rounded corners, shiny glass face, and pseudo-digital crown button on the right side. 

The bezel around the watch face is slim, but the actual display is a 1.3-inch square LCD. In other words, don't be fooled because there's a lot more bezel under the glass. It's a nice display, though—bright, crisp, and very responsive to swipes, taps, and wrist-flicks. The onboard interface is simple but easy to navigate: Swipe left to find various apps (sport mode, timer, music controller, etc.), right for quick settings (do not disturb, find my phone, etc.), up for notifications, and down to go through activity data. The side button/digital crown takes you back to the main screen and turns the display on and off. The crown also turns, but this has no functionality.

The ID205L may be pretty unoriginal, design-wise, but I don't really mind. It's a little flatter than the Apple Watch and its case is made of plastic, so it's also quite a bit lighter. The Apple Watch 6 doesn't feel particularly bulky on my wrist, but the ID205L is just a tad bit sleeker, though it looks a lot cheaper. I like the color options a lot, actually—very luxe combos that make the otherwise boring device stand out. Letsfit doesn't seem to have any ID205L-specific replacement straps for sale, but the straps are installed via quick-release spring bar, so any generic quick-release watch band should be compatible.

Letsfit Smartwatch ID205L review: Fitness features and performance

The biggest issue with fitness trackers and smartwatches at the low end of the budget tends to be their accuracy (or lack thereof). Nobody expects a $35 smartwatch to be as precise as one that costs 10 times that, but the best cheap fitness trackers all do a decent job at this, so there's no reason to waste valuable wrist space.

The Letsfit ID205L tracks several metrics: Step count, distance, calories burned, workout-specific "sport mileage," sleep, and heart rate. The built-in heart rate monitor is set up for continuous 24-hour monitoring (which can be turned off to save battery life). There’s no built-in GPS, though the watch can use your phone’s GPS if the two devices are connected. The ID205L has several preset workout modes (run, walk, bike, hike, climbing, treadmill, spinning, and yoga), and the GPS connectivity only works when you're actively using one of the first four modes. This can't be toggled on or off, but it's a pretty standard setting to preserve battery life.

When it comes to accuracy, the ID205L has a few issues—but, for the most part, they're pretty minor when it comes to the big picture. For example: The ID205L doesn't offer any direct setting for adjusting stride length, but it does base stride length on height. So, if you find the ID205L is inaccurately reporting your step count, you can tweak your height for accuracy. It's not the most efficient way to set stride length, but at least it's an option.

The ID205L is a little wonky when it comes to heart rate tracking. Not totally inaccurate, but inconsistent. About 90 percent of the time the ID205L measured my heart rate accurately—within a few beats of my other methods (Apple Watch 6, a wrist-based blood pressure monitor, the tried-and-true finger-to-the-pulse method). And then the other 10 percent or so, the ID205L just…kind of missed the mark. I'd look down and it would say my heart rate was 125 while my Apple Watch was reading 65, and then the next reading both monitors would say 65. I'm not sure what was going on, but because the ID205L has continuous heart rate monitoring, this isn't actually as big of a deal as it might sound. The majority of the ID205L's readings are accurate, so you shouldn't have any trouble getting an accurate overall look at your heart rate, once you subtract the outliers.

Letsfit Smartwatch ID205L review: Sleep tracking

I had trouble getting the sleep tracking to work properly, but this is probably at least partly due to my unusual sleep schedule. It's not uncommon for budget sleep tracking to only track sleep during "night" hours, which I personally think is ridiculous since the people most interested in tracking their sleep are probably people who don't have traditional night-only sleep schedules. 

That said, I don't actually know if night hours are a restriction on the ID205L because while it did only track my sleep during the times I slept at night, it didn't track all of those nights and the nights it did track were mostly inaccurate. I'd be okay with this if there were some way to manually input sleep in the app, but there isn't. So, let's just say this isn't the device for sleep tracking.  

Letsfit Smartwatch ID205L review: App and notifications

Being a budget smartwatch, you won’t get nearly the same features on the Letsfit Smartwatch as you would with an Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2, or the Fitbit Versa 3. There’s no app store, nor is there mobile payments or music storage. 

The Letsfit ID205L pairs with the VeryFitPro app (available on both iOS and Android). It's not the most polished app, but it gets the job done and is fairly simple to navigate when you're setting up the watch and toggling notifications. The app does sort of act as a fitness/tracking app—it has overviews of your activity, sleep, and heart rate data—but you can't manually enter in data (you can start activities, such as GPS-connected workouts, from the app, but you can't log them after the fact). You can set up the app so it shares data with Apple Health or Strava; both are better options for actually tracking your fitness data.

The ID205L offers a number of notifications and alerts that you can set up in the app. You can get notifications for phone calls, emails, texts, and over a dozen social networks and third-party messaging services (but not some group messaging services, such as Slack or Discord). You can also set up alerts for calendar events and alarms—though you can only set up alarms in the app, not on the device itself.

The notification system isn't perfect (it's certainly not pretty, they're using some command terminal type font) but it's pretty useful once you have it set up. Notifications are pushed to the watch quickly (except for incoming phone calls, which have a built-in three-second delay; I'm not sure why), where they can be dismissed directly from the device. And although I did miss support for Discord, I was impressed by the variety of third-party messaging services the app did support (including Line, Viber, Kakao Talk, and Telegram).

Letsfit Smartwatch ID205L review: Battery life

The ID205L has great battery life, though it varies quite a bit depending on how you use it. I had no problem getting the advertised 10+ days of battery life with what I consider to be regular usage (continuous heart rate monitoring turned on, a couple of hour-long GPS workouts each week), though GPS workouts seem to be the biggest potential battery drain. It has pretty epic standby life, too: I charged the ID205L when I first received it, but set it aside when COVID-19 started going crazy. It  lasted about four months on standby (the advertised standby charge is 30 - 40 days). In fact, I was starting to get pretty annoyed with its heart rate monitor lighting up in my drawer every few hours.

Letsfit Smartwatch ID205L review: Verdict

The Letsfit Smartwatch ID105L probably seems like it has a lot of caveats, and…it does. It's definitely not a device that can compete with high-end smartwatches or even high-end fitness trackers. But it's also very inexpensive, so what did you expect? It all boils down to what you're looking for in a smartwatch. The ID205L is impressive in some areas: It's light, slim, and comfortable; it has a bright easy-to-use display and an intuitive interface; and it offers quick notification and alerts from a variety of third-party apps. It's not the most accurate tracker but it's not terrible, especially if you use it in conjunction with another device—such as your phone, which you'll need anyway for GPS connectivity. The Letsfit ID205L is nowhere near the best smartwatch, but it's not bad—especially for the price.