bandario

Prior to purchasing the Rogbid Tank S2, I owned an Amazfit T-Rex Pro. It was a great watch and lasted me exactly 12 Months from date of purchase.

I grew to rely on the smartwatch functionality, regularly using all features but particularly coming to rely on the vibration alarm clock, countdown timer, notifications and sleep tracking.

The Amazfit T-Rex Pro falls into a unique class of smartwatches where the smartwatch functionality is carefully balanced against battery life.

For me, there is no point owning a WATCH that must be charged at night, or every 2nd night because sleep tracking is one of the major reasons I own one of these devices in the first place.

For that reason, one of my primary purchase characteristics is battery life, and here the Amazfit T-Rex Pro ticked the box. 18 days without a charge, but still retains most of the functionality of a truly smart watch. I have owned Samsung smartwatches in the past and found that I simply ended up not using them due to how often they require charging.

Unfortunately, whilst shaking out my trousers one evening, my belt hit and cracked the screen of the T-Rex pro. I attempted to obtain a replacement screen glass from Amazfit but they informed me that they “do not sell spare parts for their products”.

How disappointing. $300 down the drain! The watch lasted another 6 months from this time but eventually succumbed to water ingress due to the cracked glass.

After 12 months, I felt naked without a watch and really missed the ability to quickly check my notifications without getting my phone out of my pocket etc.

I decided on the Garmin Fenix 6X pro as a worthy successor but didn’t have the spare cash laying around at that moment to afford one.

Enter the Rogbid S2 Tank. The S2 was purchased by me at release for the princely sum of $60AUD.

At the time I had no intention of keeping this watch long term; it was simply a stop-gap whilst I saved up the considerable sum to purchase the Fenix 6X Pro.

It arrived from China quickly, and I was immediately surprised by the construction quality. The S2 Tank is a hefty beast, weighing in at 68 grams and with a zinc-alloy body construction…this thing means business, and is extremely well constructed.

I work in forestry and after 3 months of extremely rough daily wear this thing shows absolutely no signs of physical wear whatsoever. I can’t tell you how many times this thing has been knocked and scraped and hit with branches and tools and firewood and it looks absolutely brand new.

The metal body is seemingly completely scratch proof and whatever protection is build into the glass covering the 1.83” 240x284px IPS screen with 331PPI is truly incredible. As stated previously, I have owned watches that cost up to 10x the price of the Rogbid Tank S2…nothing has come close. Every other watch I’ve ever used would have been scratched to hell by now and this thing still looks absolutely brand new with zero attempt to preserve the life of this cheap watch. So what is it like to use?

Well…it’s fine. It has been rather pleasant to return to a responsive touchscreen interface after the buttons-only design of the T-Rex. The battery life has averaged around 20 days between charges. I can actually make and receive calls on the device if I so choose, I can receive and read text messages and make short responses. The sleep tracking and heart rate monitoring have proved to be quite accurate. It has a built in calculator, countown-timer, a wealth of activity tracking functions, it can get a weather forecast out to several days, has a couple of gimmicky little games built in and the UI is slick and functional and lift-to-wake function works great.

As for physical size, it looks and feels fine – I barely notice it and it doesn’t look ridiculous on my normal man-sized wrist.

The silicone strap is of an extremely durable construction with a dual-latch design. Even moving through the roughest terrain this thing has never come off, which is more than can be said of my previous smartwatches which would either pop off at the attachment points or simply come undone as I bash through the undergrowth.

There are a bunch of cool watch faces to choose from too.

What DOESN’T it do well?

A few things.

The app that the watch pairs with is called “Da Fit”, and that name should give you some idea as to the quality of the app.

It seems to be a generic platform shared by a host of Chinese smartwatches. Generally, it functions fine. It’s stable and intuitive to setup the watch as you’d like, but there are a few major flaws here.

The biggest for me is the notification settings. Notifications are controlled on a per-app basis for calls, messages, facebook, twitter, whatsapp, skype, Instagram and Wechat. The problem arises in receiving notifications from other applications that are not in that list…they all fall under the category of “others”.

Flicking the switch next to “others” does result in notification from your other apps such as outlook or telegram coming through, but you have also accepted every silly little notification that your phone generates coming to your watch. This quickly becomes problematic when using google maps for navigation for example, because each turn and direction results in a vibration and notification on your watch. There’s also a myriad of other phone notifications that you just do not need or want on your watch, but if you flicked that ‘other’ switch…too bad. You’re getting them.

In short, this is an unacceptable solution. Without the ability to manually select individual apps to allow notifications through, it’s useless. Basically you can receive notifications from the apps listed above and nothing else. It simply isn’t viable to let all ‘others’ come through as it results in an awful experience.

Next are the alarms and vibration issues. As stated, I absolutely love having a silent alarm on my watch. All of my previous smartwatches have done this well. A vibrating alarm on my wrist just for me, so that I don’t have to wake my wife up at unreasonable hours of the morning when I go to work.

The Rogbid handles this poorly. The vibration through such a tank of a watch is too meagre to guarantee it will actually wake me up. Further still, in order to not blind myself with the light of a thousand suns I have to enable DND mode and turn off wrist-raise notification before I go to sleep. Guess which function this also disables? That’s right, the alarm clock.

In short, this is my biggest disappointment with this watch.

Support: None-existent. As might be expected from a $60 watch, do not expect any support from the manufacturer or anything resembling a warranty. When the watch received a firmware update through Da Fit one day, it failed halfway through. The watch turned itself off and sat there for 2 days doing nothing. I was surprisingly disappointed to lose the little bugger. I contacted support twice and no response even though by all appearances it seemed as though they had killed the watch remotely via their firmware update.

On the weekend I put it on charge just to see what happen and to my glorious surprise it came back to life with a brand new firmware! A win for me, but Rogbid had already revealed their level of support – I never got a response from them.

Other Surprises:

My previous 3 watches have had GPS functionality built into the watches themselves. This allows you to gain a GPS fix and go for a hike or a run without bringing your phone. I thought I would miss this feature far more than I actually have on the Tank S2, but the reality is that I always have my phone in my backpack in case of emergencies. The Rogbid tank has had zero issue staying paired to my phone in this condition and as such activity tracking has worked just fine.

Probably the biggest surprise with this watch is how on earth they have managed to make such a high quality watch for such a low price. To get this level of specifications and build quality in another brand you will surely be spending over $500.

It makes my Amazfit T-Rex pro look like a children’s toy and for the most part, it works better save for those few features mentioned above.

Where to now:

Well, it seems my temporary stop-gap measure has become my permanent watch for now. Given how well this thing works I have got a difficult task to try and justify the purchase of a $600+ watch whilst this thing is doing 90% of the things a $600 watch would.

I wish I could get it to integrate with the ‘sleep as android’ app like all my others have done, and I wish the alarm functionality were better but neither of these are dealbreakers for me.

This thing has been a real surprise and has seriously impressed me, and not just for the price. The standout feature to me is the build quality, durability and style, which can’t really be conveyed in pictures.

I’m extremely impressed with what it can do and with the purchase price! If you are looking for a stop-gap, or just a decent little smartwatch take my list of caveats above and think about this as an option.

Check out my review in this XDA thread. Soon to be updated detailing improvements in latest firmware.