Kospet Tank T3 Ultra (Hardware)
Official GBAtemp Review
Product Information:
- Official Store: https://kospet.com/products/kospet-tank-t3-ultra-smartwatch
Review Approach:
Since 2018 Kospet has been progressively iterating smart watches into something increasingly more desirable. Today I have the Kospet Tank T3 Ultra to try out and if first impressions are anything to go by, I think we have a strong contender for the top spot when it comes to affordability, features, and build quality.
As an avid smart-wear enthusiast, I have been rocking several smartwatches over the years. My current daily driver, and favouritewatch to date, is the Apple Watch S8 which I find incredibly intuitive, and smart enough to track anything and everything I could need. The main caveat with an Apple watch is the battery life, and as such I rarely track sleep at all with it, because it's on my nightstand getting juiced ready for the next day.
The Kospet range of watches immediately swings for the fences by touting a 470mAh battery that will last an average of 12-15 days in moderate use, or a staggering 50 days on standby. This depends on brightness, tracking intervals, notification frequency and the like. Still, even with a week's battery out of it through extreme use: this watch is, statistically at least, incredibly desirable.
Features for Days, Battery for Weeks!
With features spanning 5 ATM & IP69K waterproofing, altitude, barometric, compass and a dual-band 6-satellite GPS built-in, the T3 Ultra has a plethora of features that any budding explorer would be lost without.
Note: Each of these features is to be used as a guide and not a super-accurate form of measurement. there is bound to be variation, but in general I found there to be very little.
130+ sports modes feature on this device, and quite frankly I don't think that I could name 130 sports activities to save my life, but it's an incredible feat to have such a versatile array of features at your fingertips, should you be an avid adventurer or keen sporty type.
Incredibly this version also features stroke detection, stroke count/rate and lap/pace tracking for aquatic people who want to track absolutely everything to evaluate the data and use it to improve their efficiency and technique when swimming.
I mainly used the auto-detecting tracking for bike rides, walking, working and also sleep tracking, as these are within the main cluster of activities the watch will automatically detect. Unlike with my Apple Watch: I did not worry about the battery not being ample for the following day.
I frequently monitored my heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen and even stress levels to gain insights into my bodily habits whilst wearing the watch and I feel that the device correctly identified my conditions with a staggeringly accurate degree of accuracy. When I felt stressed it confirmed those results visually, and when I felt fatigued it too visualised my elevated statistics and converted these into calories burnt versus active hours. When I stopped for too long, the sedentary reminder also gave me the bump in needed to get up and carry on with whatever task I was doing at the time.
I have to say that the results I witnessed were entirely in line with what I would expect from any other smartwatch I have used, and as such I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this watch for those features.
Rugged by Name, Burley by Nature
Visually the Kospet T3 Ultra is, as the name implies, a tank!
The oversized styling of a typical analogue watch shines through with burley design choices and four clickable buttons accentuating the circumference of the circular face. With a weight of roughly 80 grams and a 14.6mm thickness to the main meat of the device, the AMOLED screen is framed to perfection with classic watch looks.
The straps are rubber, and to some extent, this is a marmite area that some may think feels cheapened or conversely feel that this is the best option we could have been given. Texturally, the rubber straps feel floppy and thin, but in the context of daily wear, the rubber is extremely comfortable, forgiving and very durable.
The buttons are solid and satisfactorily clicky, and on the underside the sensor sits slightly protruding to give you perfect readings, flush against your wrist, but not too much as not to disturb your skin even if you get hot and sweaty, wearing it for a long period.
The screen is a wonderfully crisp, large, 1.43" HD AMOLED display with a generous coating of Corning Gorilla Glass 3, encapsulated by a Stainless Steel bezel. The screen has a 461 pixel density and a stellar 1000 nits peak brightness to compensate for any conditions however I noticed that my polarized glasses do not play well with them. The screen must use polarized glass because if I twist my glasses around 90 degrees the visibility of the screen changes from 100% visible to barely 10% visible.
As a cyclist, the rock-solid build quality, large bright screen and bomb-proof weather resistance sounds perfect, but considering I wear my Oakley shades almost every day without fail to avoid sun glare and protect my eyes: this is somewhat of a misstep for anyone who wants to wear any form of polarised glasses day to day.
Who is most likely to wear polarised glasses? Sportspeople, outdoorsy people, and people out on the water. This begs the question: why polarize the screen at all if those people are the target market? It's an odd choice, not decisively terrible, but definitely something to consider when purchasing.
Refined OS, Minor Quibbles
My one recurring bone of contention with devices like these is the OS it runs on and the sluggishness or "character" throughout.
I have to admit that this is probably the sleekest OS I have seen in recent times, however, it is not without its foibles.
Most glaringly is the SEL or "Select" button functionality, which I can't quite wrap my head around. Surely you have select or back, so you scroll to an app using "Up" and "Down" and surely select it with the "Sel" button, but no, it acts as a back button, so does the same action as the back button does in that context.
You can tap the app icon to start the app, so what is the "Sel" button there for? Perhaps just to balance the aesthetics of the face, or just for use in fringe-case apps that use it.
Another quirky, weird and frankly perplexing state I got the watch into is that of being stuck inside an auto-detected sports tracking mode. Again the "Back" button failed me and the method to escape this series of screens was to swipe from left to right, to back out of that mode.
Another annoyance came from the always-on display. I set the watch face and had it working with "raise to wake" just fine. I enabled the always-on mode and set it to follow watch face settings whereby the watch is always on, ok working as expected. The quirk comes from disabling the always-on display and the "raise to wake" feature seemingly no longer works as intended even after enabling and disabling it a couple of times to try to knock it back into functioning.
The always-on display also allows you to have a minimal version of the actual face design to match it and save power, or you can select an alternate face to display the time persistently until you tap or use a button to open the watch and activate it as it were. The issue I had was that the always-on-display face was constantly changing. Sometimes it was the minimal version of the face I had chosen, sometimes it was a minimal but simple-to-read digital face, and at other times a strange orange default-looking minimal face that I had never selected.
It's minor in the grand scheme of things and on reflection, the OS works superbly 98% of the time, but I guess with such complexity of conditions and overlapping settings these things slipped through the net?
Incredible Pricing, Superb Package
The Kospet Tank T3 Ultra is a beast of a deal when it comes to boiling down its features, price and build quality. At just £106 it is an absolute steal that is worth far more than the sum of its parts. The watch also comes with a magnetic USB charger, the 22mm rubber straps and a glass screen protector kit.
With such a range of functions, built-in apps and connectivity features, out of the box the Kospet is incredibly versatile, and when paired with the Kospet Fit companion app you get a heck of a lot more in terms of customisation, and tracking statistics.
The setup was super simple with the app, QR code and Bluetooth engaged, and I found that the general ease of use of this device is streets ahead of most contrived low-end Android wearables. Is this running Android? I'm not 100% sure, and cannot find confirmation, but whatever it runs is smoother than most comparably priced Android devices that are heavily customised upon an old Android version.
I easily got 7 days of use out of this device, with 14% spare before I eventually re-charged it, and I used it a lot to check messages, run the various built-in health monitors, and play about with it in general, putting it through its paces.
In my opinion, the T3 Ultra exceeds expectations and should be considered if you're looking for an Android and IOS-compatible feature-rich smartwatch that does it all, and could probably survive a nuclear blast.
Product links
Interested in getting a Kospet T3 Ultra of your own? Check out the product and store pages below where you can use a discount code to make your puchase!
Learn more from the product page
Promotion Code： KOLNPUT
Promotion time：21st March---28th April
Prices start at $109.99
Verdict
- Incredible battery life.
- 130+ modes of sport detection.
- Dual-GPS security.
- Always on display.
- Military-grade proofing
- Not polarised glasses-friendly
- Minor OS nuances
- Weak vibrations
