Zeacool Fitness Tracker Review: AMOLED, 5 ATM, Heart Rate

Zeacool's listing has gone dark. The ASIN no longer resolves at Amazon, so the Zeacool Fitness Tracker is a discontinued proposition rather than a live purchase, and the people it still matters to are mostly the ones already wearing one. What they have on the wrist is a Bordeaux band built around a 1.10'' AMOLED touch color screen, rated 5 ATM, counting heart rate, steps, distance, calories and sleep.

That panel is the whole argument for it. Color and taps instead of a monochrome strip is what this tracker was sold on, and a color emissive panel is the demanding component in a device this small, both in power draw and in the room it takes up on a wrist. Almost everything else about it, good and awkward alike, follows from the decision to fit one.

The 1.10'' AMOLED on the Zeacool Fitness Tracker

AMOLED means each pixel makes its own light, so a black pixel is simply off. On a watch that shows as genuinely black backgrounds and saturated color, and it is the whole of what the technology promises. That promise is a real one rather than a marketing flourish.

The spec line bundles three claims, though, not one: emissive, color, and touch. Each of the three has a consequence, and the third has the largest.

Then there is the other half of the number. 1.10 inches is the diagonal of the panel, which puts the display at a little over an inch corner to corner. Small, in other words, and small in a way that shapes how the whole device gets operated rather than just how it looks. Even the Bordeaux color points at the same buyer the screen does, someone who wants a wrist device that reads as an accessory first and an instrument second.

What a color panel costs in charging

Emissive pixels draw current in proportion to the light they emit, and that mechanism sits underneath this tracker's most predictable weakness. Charging is a regular event here rather than an occasional one, and it is the direct cost of the feature the product is named for. Nothing about it is hidden or surprising. It does have to fit your routine, though.

So the practical consequence is a habit rather than a hardship. The Zeacool Fitness Tracker belongs to the class of wearables you top up on a schedule, and anyone who wants to strap something on and forget it exists is looking at the wrong shape of product entirely.

My own read is that this is among the least interesting things to hold against it. A charging routine stops being a chore roughly the moment it becomes a routine. The buyers who should weigh it heavily are the ones shopping precisely to stop thinking about their devices, and for them it is not a small thing at all.

The interface a touch screen implies

A touch panel changes how a device gets operated. The screen is also the control surface, which is what the word touch in that spec line is actually telling you, and this particular control surface is a little over an inch across. Learning your way around one takes some time. That is the honest source of the learning curve here, and it reads as arithmetic rather than as a design failure.

Expect some fumbling early on, then. It is worth planning for rather than worrying about, and it matters most if you are buying the Zeacool Fitness Tracker as a gift for someone less at home with touch devices, where sitting down with them once will do more good than leaving them to work it out alone.

Phone compatibility is the other thing to settle before buying rather than after. It is not universal here, so that is the check I would run first, before anything else about the tracker matters.

The numbers the panel is there to show

A screen this prominent only earns what it costs if the numbers behind it are worth looking at. The payload here is the standard one: heart rate, steps, distance, calories and sleep. Nothing on that list is unusual for the category, and nothing obvious is missing from it either.

Steps and walking are named outright in the product's own title, a step counter for walking, and that is the honest centre of gravity here. Heart rate is the other figure that earns its place, covering both halves of what people normally want from it: a live reading during a workout and a resting number to watch over time. Calories and distance round out the set.

What the Zeacool Fitness Tracker is really asking, then, is whether you want an ordinary metric set delivered in color and by touch instead of in a monochrome line. For the walking-and-daily-steps buyer it was built for, that is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and it is the whole of the case for it.

Overnight, when the display goes dark

Sleep tracking is where the headline spec falls silent. Nobody reads a screen at three in the morning. The panel is dark, and the only thing that matters is whether the strap is comfortable enough to forget. Zeacool got that priority right: comfortable enough to wear all day and all night is exactly the standard a sleep-tracking device has to meet.

What gets recorded is duration and pattern, and that is the sensible expectation to carry into it. Read the totals and the trend rather than treating any of it as a clinical readout. The question a tracker like this answers well is whether you slept as long as you think you did, and it answers that one honestly.

Which means the feature the whole product is sold on earns nothing at all for the hours it spends on a wrist overnight. That is not a mark against it. It does mean the panel is a daytime argument, and the case for keeping the Zeacool Fitness Tracker on through the night rests entirely on the strap and on the sleep numbers.

5 ATM, and what a waterproof rating covers

In water, the panel stops being the point again. A 5 ATM rating is a serious one, covering showering, rain and pool swimming rather than merely surviving a splash, and of everything claimed here it is the spec I would believe most readily, because sealing is pass-or-fail engineering rather than a tuning claim.

It is worth being precise about what a rating like that is, though. It describes what the device survives. On its own it says nothing about what the device does while it is under water, which is a separate question that a waterproof rating was never built to answer. Buy it because the tracker comes through a shower and a swim intact, in other words, and not because the number seems to imply a mode.

The build has to carry that panel through the same duty cycle, and durability and comfort are the two priorities it aims at, which are the right two for something worn continuously. Color is the one place the design closes a door: the options are limited, and Bordeaux is the one this comes in, so a buyer who dislikes it has nothing to negotiate with.

Pros: What we liked

• Pro: 1.10'' AMOLED touch color screen, with the true blacks the technology gives you
• Pro: 5 ATM rating covers showering, rain and pool swimming, not just splashes
• Pro: Heart rate covers both a live workout figure and a resting number over time
• Pro: Sleep duration and patterns, and comfortable enough to keep on overnight
• Pro: The Bordeaux color reads as an accessory rather than a gadget

Cons: What could be better

• Con: The color panel wants charging on a regular cadence, not an occasional one
• Con: The screen is also the control surface, so there is a learning curve first
• Con: Phone compatibility is not universal, so check yours before buying
• Con: Color options are limited, and Bordeaux is the one this comes in
• Con: Discontinued at Amazon: the listing is delisted and the ASIN no longer resolves

Final Verdict

The panel earned its keep. Color and taps on the wrist is a real difference rather than a spec-sheet one, and the bill came in two parts: charging on a cadence, and a control surface small enough that you have to learn it. Anyone who wanted an ordinary metric set delivered in color, on something that reads as an accessory, got a fair trade for that. Anyone who wanted to strap a band on and forget about it never would have.

For a shopper, the Fitbit Charge 4 and the Garmin Vivosmart 4 are the competitors worth putting beside it. For everyone else, the people already wearing a Bordeaux Zeacool Fitness Tracker, the charging cadence and the compatibility caveat are description rather than warning.