The £35 Archon Touch Fitness Wristband is a straight talking iOS & Android friendly fitness monitoring solution for those who want to keep an eye on the fundamentals of fitness tracking on a budget.

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Design & Display

At just 0.94mm thick and 16g in weight, the Archon Touch Fitness Wristband is discrete and completely unrestrictive on the wrist due to its small profile. The interchangeable straps come in six bright colours: pink, orange, green, blue, purple and black. The 0.91mm OLED touch display is bright but can be a little tiring to navigate because the display doesn't always register the finger interactions during the constant swipes left and right to scroll through readings of calories burnt, distance travelled, steps taken, etc. The default screen shown upon double tapping to awake is the time, date and battery life - and it is easy to read. Lastly, it’s definitely waterproof; we’ve washed our hands with it on, which is likely the wettest most will get it, but we also placed it within a cup of water for 15 minutes to conclude it can survive being entirely submerged in water.

Performance

Accuracy is, of course, difficult to measure. Steps taken, work out intensity, calories burned and distance travelled are all recorded but, as we can’t manually count every step we take or how many calories we have burned to an exact number, then we cannot clarify the results. However, the App does accumulate a few details about the wearer, such as their height and weight, to better track steps. However, it oddly always defaults to a goal of 10,000 steps per day, although this can fortunately be increased for those looking to shed the grams. Nevertheless, we did manually count 100 steps and then checked the Archon Touch display to note that it was just one step less - not bad at all! A running trial proved the tracker can keep up with the pace of steps and the sensors understand the intensity of how much effort you’re putting in - all reported back to the App. Whilst that level of accuracy may be a constant when walking, jogging and running, we have noticed that sometimes when typing, steps can be accumulated in their dozens, and this also goes for eating, etc. Not unusual behaviour from a fitness tracker though.

The ability to track sleep quality was a feature we couldn't figure out how to access for months. It turns out a simple single tap on the running man in the activity window displays this info. Whilst we’d take these readings with a pinch of salt due to the reliance on sensors, it’s interesting nevertheless to see the interpreted differences from being awake, in light sleep and deep sleep. We have to hand it to the technology that it does always accurately detect when we’re awake in bed.

App

The App encourages the setting of targets and the sharing of such achievements via social media. It’s also the bridge between linking push notifications, caller IDs and messages to the Archon Touch Fitness Wristband display - and your wrist also gets a pulsing buzz to notify. We were completely satisfied with the speediness of the connectivity via Bluetooth and how the information is synced back to the App. The App itself is easy to navigate and presents in-depth daily to monthly detail of activity, allows for adjustment of settings, and really importantly the home screen is an easy to read dashboard of your daily info.

Verdict

The Archon Touch Fitness Wristband presents incredible value for those looking for a discrete fitness tracker that takes care of the fundamentals of steps, calories and effort put in as accurately as some of the more expensive options. Whilst it lacks features like heart rate monitoring and a more detailed user interface, it works very well within the agenda Archon has set out. Buy on Amazon