The Just Corseca Ray Kanabis: A Rugged Smartwatch With A Mixed Bag Of Features
Smartwatches are generally delicate devices, requiring careful handling to protect their sensitive components. But the Just Corseca Ray Kanabis is different. Priced at Rs. 5,999, this smartwatch boasts a rugged design with IP68 dust and water resistance and a durable rubber wrist strap. It’s built to withstand the elements, making it ideal for active lifestyles. The Ray Kanabis also offers features like heart rate and SpO2 monitoring, phone call functionality, and activity tracking. But is it worth the price tag? Let’s dive into our in-depth review to find out.
Just Corseca Ray Kanabis: Design and Aesthetics
While many budget-friendly smartwatches are essentially glorified notification displays, the Just Corseca Ray Kanabis aims for a more comprehensive experience. Its relatively high price point of Rs. 5,999 can be partially attributed to its rugged, Casio G-Shock-inspired design, which we found quite appealing.
The Ray Kanabis comes in three colors: black, green, and blue. While all the color options look good, the black variant complements the preinstalled watch faces best. The smartwatch features an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance, ensuring it can withstand various outdoor activities.
The Ray Kanabis sports a round 1.28-inch IPS LCD touch display with a resolution of 240×240 pixels and a UV reflective coating for optimal visibility in bright sunlight. Two buttons on the right side serve as wake-up triggers, with the top button functioning as the Back and Home button in menus and the bottom button used for cycling through preinstalled apps. Navigation relies primarily on tap and swipe gestures.
The included rubber strap, although pre-attached, can be replaced with any aftermarket 44mm watch strap. The strap is waterproof and sturdy, featuring multiple adjustment points for a comfortable fit. The box also includes a magnetic pogo-pin charger for convenient charging.
Software, Interface, and App: A Third-Party Approach
Unlike some budget smartwatch manufacturers like Noise and Realme, which utilize their own dedicated apps, Just Corseca relies on the third-party Da Fit app. This app, familiar from our review of the Fire-Boltt Talk, is available for both iOS and Android.
The Ray Kanabis shares more than just the Da Fit app with the Fire-Boltt Talk. Both smartwatches feature built-in speakerphone functionality enabled through Bluetooth audio pairing, and their user interfaces are remarkably similar in terms of preinstalled apps, fonts, menus, and controls.
The most prominent difference lies in the watch faces. The Ray Kanabis offers four preinstalled watch faces that complement its rugged aesthetic. These can be previewed and selected using the Da Fit app, which also allows downloading additional watch faces.
The user interface is simple yet functional, effectively covering the Ray Kanabis’ feature set. A Quick Settings drop-down menu provides quick access to brightness, connection status, day, date, and battery level. Swiping from left to right brings up the app list, while swiping right to left cycles through health trackers like steps, sleep, heart rate, blood pressure, SpO2, and speakerphone. Swiping upward reveals unread notifications from your smartphone.
While the overall interface is functional, we found the screen responsiveness a bit inconsistent. Swipe gestures were not always registered, and accidental taps were a recurring issue. We even experienced an accidental reset, requiring us to go through the pairing process again.
The Da Fit app, however, is well-designed and offers reliable connectivity, providing easy access to health tracking data, basic settings, and smartwatch preferences. You can customize the watch face, enable notifications for specific apps, set alarms, use the smartwatch as a shutter remote for your smartphone camera, and much more.
Just Corseca Ray Kanabis: Performance and Battery Life
The Da Fit app’s compatibility with both Android and iOS makes the Ray Kanabis device-agnostic. We tested the Ray Kanabis with an Android OnePlus 9. The smartwatch functions reasonably well for health and fitness tracking, even without a connected smartphone, thanks to the Da Fit app.
For features like timely push notifications, a continuous connection between the smartwatch and your phone is essential. The Ray Kanabis efficiently handles notifications, allowing you to specify which apps can push notifications to the smartwatch. The list of supported apps is impressive, encompassing popular choices like WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and standard phone and messaging apps.
The Ray Kanabis’ screen can be woken using a lift-to-wake gesture or by pressing either physical button. Unfortunately, a tap-to-wake feature is absent, and the lift-to-wake gesture proved unreliable, frequently failing to register. A tap-to-wake option would have been extremely helpful in such scenarios, as pressing a button requires extra effort. The top button, pressed on the home screen, is the only way to turn off the display; no alternate gestures like palm covering are available. You can set a screen timeout interval to automatically turn it off.
The Ray Kanabis provides several sports and activity modes, including walking, running, cycling, skipping, badminton, basketball, and football. We focused on basic activities such as walking and stair climbing for activity tracking and tested sleep, heart rate, and SpO2 tracking.
During a manual count of 1,000 steps, the Ray Kanabis measured 1,077 steps, resulting in an error margin of almost eight percent. This remained consistent across longer distances and higher step counts, diverging significantly from readings obtained using an Apple Watch Series 5. Distance measurements while walking were roughly comparable to the readings on the Apple Watch, despite the step count disparity.
Heart rate tracking proved accurate, aligning with readings from both our Apple Watch and a pulse oximeter while sitting. However, while walking, it deviated by up to seven beats per minute compared to the Apple Watch. In some instances, readings from both devices were similar when worn simultaneously, making it difficult to pinpoint the cause of this inconsistency.
SpO2 tracking was erratic and unreliable, offering wildly different readings than a pulse oximeter. Blood pressure readings were also inconsistent, fluctuating significantly with each measurement. As we’ve emphasized before, reliable blood pressure measurements require proper medical-grade equipment, and optical sensors on smartwatches should not be considered accurate. Sleep tracking was adequate but offered basic data, accurately displaying the total hours spent sleeping the previous night.
Using the Ray Kanabis as a hands-free speakerphone for calls was convenient. Calls sounded clear and loud when the device was brought close to the ear. This also facilitated clear voice pickup by the microphone, making short calls a satisfactory experience. You can also use the speaker to play audio, but sound quality isn’t optimized for this purpose, and as expected, music sounded thin.
Additional features include a media controller app to control music playback on your smartphone, a shutter app to remotely control the camera, and a Flappy Bird clone that can be played directly on the smartwatch.
The battery life of the Ray Kanabis depends on usage patterns. With frequent notifications, a constant connection to our smartphone, regular fitness and heart rate tracking, and occasional calls, we achieved approximately seven days of usage on a single charge. This is respectable for a device in this price range, although it falls considerably short of the company’s claimed 15 days.
Verdict: Worth the Price Tag?
While the Just Corseca Ray Kanabis boasts an appealing design and a comprehensive feature set, the practical user experience wasn’t as impressive as anticipated for the price. Speakerphone functionality and app notifications work well, the Da Fit app is satisfactory overall, and battery life is decent. However, fitness and health tracking are unreliable, putting it at a significant disadvantage compared to similarly priced devices like the Realme Watch 2 Pro.
The Just Corseca Ray Kanabis might be a worthwhile option for those seeking basic smartwatch functionality. However, alternatives like the Realme Watch 2 Pro and Fire-Boltt Talk offer superior overall performance at more affordable prices, particularly if budget is a primary concern.
