I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C

Summary

Look, I'm an idiot. I know that, you know that, and the man on the moon knows that. Let's not get into why I'm an idiot; let's just accept that I have my peculiarities and you have yours. My idiocy is a quest to make sure all my portable electronics can recharge using USB-C. Modern smartwatches are tiny and they do a lot. As a consequence, their battery life is generally poor. The industry's attempts to fix this are either to replace the charging standard every year hoping to find something magical, or to lock you in to a walled-garden on proprietary nonsense. I want to recharge my watch while I'm riding the bus. That means plugging one end of a USB-C cable into the seat and the other into my wrist. That's how I recharge my phone, eReader, laptop, headphones, toothbrush, and a hundred other gadgets. Why should a watch be any different? So I bought the only smartwatch I could find with a USB-C port. The Colmi P80 - on offer at £16. It bills itself as "The world's first type-c smart watch". To be clear, I wasn't expecting this to be a good smartwatch. Anything you buy from AliExpress for the cost of a couple of pints is bound to be a bit crap. What I wanted to know is whether USB-C charging of watches is viable. What I discovered is that, yes, USB-C charging works even on a relatively small watch. Oh, and that this is a surprisingly decent bit of kit - especially given its price. Let's dive in! Video Walkthrough What Works? Charging Speed and Battery Life Heart Monitoring Sleep Monitoring What's Annoying? App Exercise Mode Instruction Manual Other Interesting Features Security OEM Open Source and GadgetBridge What's Next? Should I Buy One? If you'd rather watch and listen than read a blog post, please enjoy this shonky video: VIDEO It tells the time accurately! You can set it up without using the app (more on that later). It Bluetooth paired to my phone without a problem - and without PIN entry. I could make and receive calls from the watch - and the voice quality was...