Misfit Command review

Hybrid smartwatches tend to be for consumers who want a stylish wrist watch with months of battery life, but which can keep them up-to-date with calls, notifications on their phone and their daily activity.

The Misfit Command does exactly this but manages to cram slightly more information on its face than some of its simpler rivals. This is a hybrid smartwatch which retains more of the smarts of a ‘real’ smartwatch than some of the competition, but also manages to look like a regular watch.

You are alerted to calls and texts with a vibration - as is par for the course with all smartwatches these days - but a press of a button can also show you the day and date, the time of your alarm, and a second time zone of your choosing.

A second button can be configured to control music playback on your smartphone, operate your handset’s camera, or answer an incoming call.

Finally, the Misfit Command’s second dial shows how close you are to completing the day’s activity target, while the companion smartphone app gives a more detailed view of your daily exercise and sleep.

Misfit Command price and release date

• Price starts at £135 / $149.99 / AU$229.95
• Out now

There are four different versions of the Misfit Command. The one we are reviewing here is the matt black model with black rubber strap and copper details on the buckle, hands and case.

Misfit also sells a version which is fully black, and one which has a midnight blue rubber strap with rose gold highlights on the case and buckle. These all cost $149.99 / £135 / AU$229.95.

Finally, there is a matt silver version with a stainless steel bracelet, which costs more at $169.99 / £155 / AU$249.95.

The starting price then is slightly above the Nokia Steel for example, but slightly below the Garmin Vivomove HR.

We think all four options are attractive and will appeal to readers who want a watch with some smartness, but not so much that it starts to look like a gadget instead of a piece of jewelry or a fashion accessory.

If you fancy something more personal, all versions of the Command can be fitted with an industry-standard 20mm strap of your choice, and the buckle features a quick-release system, so it can be easily swapped.

Design

• Stylish and traditional face which is easy enough to read
• Nice range of color options, plus ability to fit any 20mm strap
• The latch can be uncomfortable against your wrist

While some hybrid smartwatches give little away on their face, instead opting to show you the meat of their capabilities via a smartphone app, the Misfit Command puts a lot on its face. At first, it feels like there is a little too much going on here and we found it took a day or so to get used to it.

There are the minute and hour hands, of course, which point to 12 subtle hour markers but are not illuminated. Their white tips help when telling the time at night, but in total darkness nothing on the Command’s face can be seen.

Between 12 o’clock and just after 6 o’clock are the numbers 1-31, to indicate the date, and from 7 o’clock to 11 o’clock are the days of the week.

A press of the upper of the watch’s two buttons causes the hour and minute hands to point to the day and date for a few seconds. It’s slower to read than a traditional date complication at 3 o’clock, but an interesting design quirk if nothing else.

Then there is the second dial, a common feature of hybrid smartwatches which is often used to show your daily steps or general activity. And that’s exactly the case here, too.

The slender hand of the second dial - finished in copper on our review unit to match the buckle and a ring around the glass - slowly works its way up from 6 o’clock to 12 as your daily ‘activity score’ grows from zero to the default total of 1,000. More on this later...

The other half of this second dial is split into icons representing other features. Press the upper button and the second hand will point to the date icon, while the hour and minute hands spin to the day and date.

Press the button again and, if you have an alarm set via the app, the second hand will point to the alarm icon, while the others show the time of your alarm. Press a third time and you’ll be shown your second time zone. Simple stuff, but executed well.

At 44mm, the Misfit Command’s case is slightly larger than your average men’s wristwatch, but it manages to not look or feel overly cumbersome, even on smaller wrists.

The case is approximately 15mm thick, which is on the chunky side for a hybrid watch, as opposed to a fully-fledged smartwatch, but the Command manages to get away with it. Perhaps years of smartwatch use has conditioned us to be more tolerant of larger wristwear, but we still think the Command hides its size well.

The case is metal, and although finished in a matt black that we thought would scratch easily, is remarkably resistant to showing any signs of wear and tear.

What we were less amused by, is how the quick-release latch on the buckle dug into the underneath of our wrist, making the watch a touch uncomfortable to wear. The latch is a sharp piece of metal which is raised to make sliding it (and thus removing the buckle) easy, but almost immediately after putting the Command on, it caused us problems.

It left a bit of a scratch on our skin which didn’t disappear after not wearing the Command overnight. We are left wondering how Misfit didn’t notice this before putting the Command into production; it just seems like such a glaringly obvious design flaw.

You could feasibly loosen the strap, but for a device designed in part to track fitness, this doesn’t seem ideal. Thankfully, fitting a different strap, or just switching out the quick-release bar for a regular one, would easily solve this.

Fitness and sleep tracking

• Automatic sleep and fitness tracking
• Manually logged activities don't count towards daily goal
• Water-resistant but no heart rate monitor

The Misfit Command uses three accelerometers to automatically track and log your daily activity and sleep. When first setting up the watch and logging into the Misfit app, you need to give it your date of birth, height and weight, and say whether you are male or female.

Giving your occupation is an option, bizarrely, and the app then spits out a fun fact - like how we burn 1,461 calories a day, which is the equivalent of four avocados. Okay, sure. Whatever you say, Misfit!

By default, the app (and the secondary dial on the watch face itself) count upwards towards a daily goal of 1,000 points. The app suggests this can be achieved by walking for 90 minutes, running for 30 minutes, or swimming for 45 minutes.

We hit the target with about 40 minutes of walking spread throughout the day, but at a pace which caused the app to log it as ‘moderate activity’.

As is often the case with hybrid smartwatches and their apps, your mileage will vary and the data produced shouldn’t be taken as gospel. It’s a useful indication of activity, not a dedicated fitness tracker - a point emphasized by the lack of a heart rate monitor. 

For each piece of meaningful movement in a day (shuffling to the fridge doesn’t count), the app logs your steps and distance covered, and estimates how many calories you have burned. Reach your daily target, and the app congratulates you with a notification.

You can also set the Misfit Command to buzz your wrist (and wave its hour and minute arms as if guiding a plane towards the terminal) if you have been inactive for an hour.

We understand the message here, and sometimes it’s useful to be told to get up and walk around, but there’s a distinct lack of intelligence. The watch reminded us three times to get active while we were on a three-hour car journey.

Beyond just counting steps, the Misfit Command and its companion app attempt to identify what you were doing during the day. However, instead of identifying ‘walking’ and ‘running’, the app logs ‘light’, ‘moderate’ and ‘vigorous’ activity.

For each of these, the app shows your steps, distance, time duration and calories burned. You can then edit each of these to say specifically what you were doing - cycling, basketball, football, tennis, running and swimming are the options - and adjust the duration if this wasn’t logged accurately.

Editing these affects your score for that day (not that we would suggest you cheat), but you can’t add entire new events for past days, such as exercise done without the watch. Also, we found that activities added manually to the current day appear in your time log, but don’t affect your score for the day.

The Misfit Command is water-resistant to a depth of 50 meters, which means swimming with it is no problem.

Any swimming you do can be manually added to the app like other activities, but through a partnership with Speedo you can pay to upgrade the Misfit app, adding swimming pool lap counting; just tell the app how long the pool is, and the watch works out the rest.

At $9.99 / £9.99 / AU$14.99, it’s a tall price to pay for adding a fairly simple function, but keen swimmers might be swayed to part with their cash.

The other half of the Misfit app is sleep tracking, which also uses the Command’s accelerometers. You first tell the app how much sleep you’d like each night - eight hours is the norm - and after a night with the Command on your wrist, the app shows how you got along.

Sleep is split into ‘awake’, ‘light’ and ‘restful’, with each assigned a color and plotted against time in a simple graph. This, and other aspects of the Misfit app, will be familiar to owners of any Fossil hybrid smartwatch, such as the Fossil Q Commuter, as Fossil acquired Misfit back in 2015 and the underlying tech is similar across the group’s devices.

It’s always difficult to say with absolute certainty whether sleep data is accurate or not, but on our first night with the Misfit Command we noticed a brief period of being awake at 4am (awake enough to check the time and remember it) was missing from the app log.

Unfortunately, the discomfort we mentioned with the quick-release buckle meant sleeping with the Command was far from ideal. After a couple of nights, we decided we’d sleep better without the watch.

This meant we’d also miss out on the watch’s silent alarm, which quietly vibrates your wrist to wake you and not your partner, but we’d rather opt for a comfier night’s sleep and a blaring alarm than the Command’s discomfort.

Also, you’ll want to remember to switch the alarm off for the nights you choose not to wear the Command, as it vibrates loudly against hard surfaces like your bedside table.

Battery life

• Misfit claims the battery lasts a year
• Case can be easily opened with a coin

As with hybrid smartwatches from other brands of the Fossil group, the Misfit Command is claimed to last a year before it needs a new battery. The watch takes a CR2430 battery, which can be bought online for under $2 / £2 / AU$3.

That year-long claim will vary based on how much you use the watch, of course, so if it is constantly buzzing with notifications then you might see less than 12 months from each battery.

Interface and app

• Simple to get up and running
• Several options for tailoring notifications and watch button

As with most hybrid smartwatches, setting up the Misfit Command takes almost no time. The watch connected quickly to our iPhone via Bluetooth, and the app then guided us through how the watch works, and how to get the most out of it. The time and date are automatically copied over from your phone, and the watch starts tracking your movement right away.

The Misfit Command works with iPhones running iOS 8.2 and newer, and with Android devices running version 4.4 and newer.

Activity tracking, as covered above, is what the Misfit app is all about. However, it is worth diving into the settings to better understand how the notification system works.

Here, you can set the watch to point at a specific hour depending on who is calling or texting you. For example, you could assign your partner to 12 o’clock and your boss to 6 o’clock.

That way, when your phone buzzes with a call or a text message you can see if it is one of those people with a quick glance at your wrist. You could of course assign 12 people, but good luck remembering which hour corresponds to which person.

As well as calls and texts, you can assign certain apps to an hour; for example, Instagram could be 3 o’clock and WhatsApp 9 o’clock. But this will mean a notification buzzing your wrist every time those apps want your attention; there is no way to only get WhatsApp notifications from a specific contact or group chat, so we think this could quickly become a nuisance.

The settings pages are also where you decide what the watch’s lower button does. Pick the music category, and one press is for play/pause, two presses skips to the next song, three skips back and a long press increases the volume.

Selfie mode takes a photo with your phone’s camera with one press or shoots a burst of images if you press and hold.

There’s also a mode for pairing with your computer over Bluetooth and using the watch as a presentation clicker, and there’s an option to customize what the button does - although beyond what we’ve just mentioned, your options are quite limited. We reckon music playback makes the most sense, and is the function we used most often.

Hybrid smartwatches like the Misfit Command mean you can keep on top of the most important notifications - calls from loved ones, emails from your boss - without being bombarded by alerts, and without strapping a miniature computer to your wrist. This particular hybrid manages to do slightly more by making use of a busy (but orderly) face and second dial.

As well as serving up life’s most important notifications, the Misfit Command offers a quick and easy way to see a second time zone, and dips its toe into fitness tracking without it being overwhelming.

More than just counting steps, it attempts to break up your daily activity into meaningful chunks of information. It doesn’t always get this quite right - and it needs your help to identify what each activity was - but if you’re willing to put some effort in, the Misfit app is as comprehensive as most casual users will need.

That quick-release buckle needs binning as soon as you free the Command from its box, and the app won’t be all things to all people, but otherwise this is an attractive hybrid smartwatch which is well priced and offers just the right amount of smart features for most users.

Who's this for?

As with most hybrid smartwatches, the Misfit Command is for those who want some of the smarts of a device like the Apple Watch 3, Samsung Gear S3 or a Wear OS smartwatch, but without the touchscreen and limited battery life.

Those looking for a basic activity tracker might be interested in the Command, and the app’s ability to track a range of activities - running, tennis, yoga, swimming etc. - is a nice bonus, but these need to be labeled manually.

Those wanting a dedicated fitness tracker might want to look elsewhere, as the Misfit’s capabilities are limited. But if you are looking for a simple place to log daily steps and exercise, the Misfit app is an attractive place to keep tabs on your fitness routine.

Should you buy it?

The Misfit Command, as with a lot of today’s hybrid watches, carefully treads the fine line between tech-focused gadget-on-the-wrist and attractive watch. The busy face might not appeal to everyone - and you could argue that hybrids should focus more on simple good looks than trying to do too much. But we think the Command just about gets away with it.

At $149.99 / £135 / AU$229.95, the Misfit Command represents decent value for money and offers a smart and subtle way to gain some connected features without investing in an all-out smartwatch.

Feeling a vibration on your wrist for calls and texts is useful, but being alerted to every WhatsApp message, or every Instagram notification, might become annoying.

That said, the Command is well priced and attractive, with enough smart features to make it a compelling purchase for those wanting a smarter watch rather than a smartwatch. Just make sure you get rid of that quick-release buckle.

First reviewed: May 2018