Want a smartwatch, not quite ready to spend hundreds of dollars for one? Lucky for you, there’s a healthy amount of entry-level options out there that pack enough features to suit many people’s needs. The Nothing CMF Watch 3 Pro is easily one of our favorites in the budget-friendly, offering an impressive mix of sleek design and features aimed at casual everyday use.
No, it won’t quite match up pound-for-pound with your Apple Watch and Android Wear models. You won’t get the same deep sports and outdoor capabilities as advanced GPS sports watches, either. It’s a lot more pared down compared to the heavy-hitters in the category. However, it does bring all the essentials, from fitness and sleep tracking to multiple sports modes and all sorts of features you expect from modern smartwatches.
The Nothing CMF Watch 3 Pro has a round watch face with an always-on 1.4-inch AMOLED display with 466 x 466 resolution (326 PPI), 650 nits of brightness, and a 60 fps refresh rate. It can be set to display any of the 120 watch faces currently available, with the option to create more using videos, photos, and even generative AI. That’s right, you can use AI to generate a custom watch face. Widgets can also be applied for fitness, weather, music, and reminders.
It’s fitted with your usual bunch of activity tracking sensors, including a dual-band, five-system GPS for more accurate route tracking and a four-channel heart rate sensor that, the outfit claims, deliver “improved accuracy across all skin tones and workout intensities.” The activity tracking looks pretty deep, as well, with 131 available sports modes, complete with an AI coach that can provide personalized post-workout summaries and guidance. It’s pretty impressive for such an affordable wearable. Aside from fitness and sleep tracking, it also offers blood oxygen monitoring, stress tracking, and women’s health tracking. Suffice to say, it offers most of the features you’ll get in much more expensive models.
The Nothing CMF Watch 3 Pro comes with ChatGPT integration, allowing users to interact with the watch using voice prompts. It also offers transcriptions for your voice recordings, which might prove extremely useful for folks who’d rather do voice notes on a watch, rather than pull out their phone each time out. The onboard 350mAh battery is rated to last 13 days on moderate use. By moderate, by the way, they mean you don’t keep the display permanently on. If you want it to function like a traditional watch with an always-on display, battery life goes down to 4.5 days, which, we’ll be honest, still sounds pretty good.
It’s designed to pair with the Nothing X app (iOS and Android), which, the outfit claims, can sync your fitness data with Strava, Apple Health, and Google Health Connect. The all-metal watch case measures 47mm, so it’s on the bigger side as far as timepieces are concerned, with a removable silicone strap in tow. It’s water- and dust-resistant to IP68 standards, too, which, again, is pretty impressive for such an affordable device. The watch is available in three colorways, namely dark gray, light gray, and orange.
The Nothing CMF Watch 3 Pro is available now, priced at just $79.
