Want to make a Wear OS watch with personality? It’s not easy. These days, most smartwatches have the stand-out appeal of bags of white flour.
Misfit does not fall into the trap of trying too hard with its design. The Vapor X looks clean, clear and tasteful, unlike the fairly ugly TicWatch watches.
It also has all the features you need, including GPS, Google Pay and a heart rate sensor. However, getting around a day of battery life under real world usage won’t impress anyone, especially when there are longer-lasting alternatives like the Fitbit Versa, Samsung Galaxy Watch and Huawei Watch GT. So on balance, is the Misfit Vapor X a smartwatch you should be considering?
Misfit Vapor X price and availability
Out now in the US
Costs $279 (around £225 / AU$410)
UK and Australian availability TBC
The Misfit Vapor X was announced in August 2019. This series has been around since 2017, and this new model is a little more expensive than earlier versions.
It costs $279 (around £225 / AU$410), which makes it roughly $80 more than the original Vapor and $30 more than the Misfit Vapor 2 from 2018.
This price rise has just become more important too. You can buy an Apple Watch 3 for $199 /£199 / AU$319, and the Huawei Watch GT is cheaper too at $199 / £199 (around AU$365), though the latter can often be found for even less.
So while the Vapor’s pricing is fairly standard for a Wear OS watch, the array of alternatives based on other platforms is wide.
The Misfit Vapor X also isn’t widely available at the time of writing – it’s out in the US, but UK and Australian availability haven’t been confirmed.
Design
Part-aluminum case
11.4mm thick
43.2g
Many of the big names in wearables like Huawei and Samsung now use their own software. Wear OS watches are largely left to smaller brands like TicWatch, Fossil and Misfit. TicWatch has earned a lot of attention for its low prices, but a day with the Misfit Vapor X will make you consider spending a bit more.
The Misfit Vapor X is a very pleasant wearable. It’s much thinner and lighter than the original Vapor and is far better-looking than any TicWatch smartwatch. Misfit hasn’t changed the look too much since the Vapor 2, but we don’t mind.
Its case is aluminum, and elegant-looking stems attach the silicone strap. This is one of the smartest-looking Wear OS watches around, and it is very comfortable. It’s light at 43.2g and not bulky at just under 12mm thick.
The silicone strap also has little lines cut into its back, which act as ventilation and make the strap more flexible. These indents will pick up salt deposits from your sweat after a while, particularly if you use the Misfit Vapor X to track exercise, but a quick rinse will get rid of them.
You don’t need to remove the strap to do this either. The Misfit Vapor X is water-resistant to 5ATM, enough for not just showering but swimming too.
Misfit has not really altered the standard Wear OS watch bezel design much, though. There’s a roughly 5mm gap between the end of the display and the edge of the watch, and the case diameter is the standard 42mm. The Misfit Vapor X doesn’t move smartwatch design forward in any way, but it is among the better-looking Wear OS models.
The physical controls match the best too. Its crown cycles between the watch face and apps screen, but also acts as a rotary dial, letting you scroll through menus and your notifications without touching the screen.
The two buttons, one to each side, open up Google Fit and Google Pay. They give you easy access to two of the more advanced uses for a smartwatch: paying for stuff and actively tracking exercise. These shortcuts can’t be customized.
Display
1.19-inch 390 x 390 AMOLED screen
Bright and offers good contrast
Misfit has not changed its screen tech either. The Misfit Vapor X has a 1.19-inch 390 x 390-pixel AMOLED screen, just like the 42mm version of the Vapor 2.
Look closely and you’ll see a hint of PenTile fizz (caused by the panel’s pixel arrangement) but from a normal distance it is sharp. Colors are bold and the very high-contrast OLED lets the screen blacks blend into the surround, at least when viewing from the front.
The Misfit Vapor X’s screen is plenty bright enough, has an ambient light sensor to allow automatic brightness changes, and there’s a boost mode for very bright conditions. We found this very useful when using the watch to track outdoor runs during the tail end of the UK summer. Sometimes the sun shines in London.
Fitness tracking
GPS provides good route tracking
HR sensor is not quite as ‘best-in-class’ as claimed
A decent fitness tracker overall
The Misfit Vapor X has all the crucial elements of a good exercise tracker: GPS, a heart rate sensor, a bright screen, music playback, and water resistance.
Misfit does not add any of its own software, so you’ll have to use Google Fit unless you hunt down another app from Google Play. There’s nothing wrong with Fit for those who run 5K a couple of times a week to keep off the pounds, though.
The Misfit Vapor X’s GPS provides very good route tracking. Run with your phone and it will use its location data as standard, but the smartwatch seems to lock on to a location about as quickly when using its own chip.
Heart rate measurements are mixed, though. The Misfit Vapor X frequently over-estimates resting heart rates, and we spotted a few unexpected peaks when recording walks and runs. Misfit claims this watch has a ‘best-in-class’ heart rate scanner, but it is an update or two away from perfection at the very least.
The Misfit Vapor X isn’t great for day-long heart rate monitoring either. Some fitness trackers provide measurements for every minute of every day, seemingly without killing the battery. But the all-day tracking mode here just offers readings every now and then.
If exercise tracking is your main goal, consider a Garmin Forerunner 735XT, Garmin Vivoactive 3 or Forerunner 235 instead. And cheap GPS bands like the Huawei Band 3 Pro are arguably just as useful. Any tracker with decent GPS and a reasonable heart rate monitor is great for casual run tracking.
The Vapor X is a good fitness tracker, but every Wear OS band at the same price has the same core fitness features nowadays.
Features and performance
Newer Snapdragon Wear 3100 does not hugely revitalize Wear OS
NFC for Google Pay
4GB of storage (1GB accessible) for music and apps
Wear OS watch features largely plateaued some time ago, but the Misfit Vapor X has all the parts you might ask for.
There’s NFC for Google Pay transactions, and an internal microphone lets you talk to Google Assistant. Just long-press the crown and its interface appears on-screen.
The Misfit Vapor X has 4GB of storage for extra apps, or music and podcasts downloaded for listening without a phone. You can connect a pair of wireless headphones directly to the smartwatch for this purpose. You don’t get all 4GB of that to play with, of course – the majority is taken up by the operating system and preinstalled software. Before installing any third-party apps, our Misfit Vapor X had 0.95GB left, enough for a few albums but not a whole music collection.
There were no extra apps pre-installed on our Misfit Vapor X, but the watch does come with a handful of tasteful, if fairly vanilla, watch faces.
None of these features are special for a Wear OS watch. But the Misfit Vapor X does have the Snapdragon Wear 3100 chipset, rather than the older Snapdragon Wear 2100 used in the Misfit Vapor 2. This had raised a few eyebrows at the older watch’s release as the 3100 was already available, so it’s good to see its successor included in this smartwatch.
The newer version adds a Cortex-M0 co-processor. This handles certain very low-intensity jobs, with the aim of increasing power efficiency.
It does not make the Misfit Vapor X much more powerful than its predecessor, though, as the Snapdragon 3100 has four primary Cortex-A7 cores just like the previous-generation version.
Sure enough, the Misfit Vapor X is not a hugely responsive watch, just like most other Wear OS bands. The basics of flicking between the watch face and apps screen are usually quick enough, and there’s little-to-none of the pervasive scroll lag that affects some old watches, but it’s simply not that snappy.
Recently-run apps tend to appear in about a second. Those you open fresh take around 2.5-3 seconds to appear. It affects the shortcut hardware buttons on the watch too. The competition brings this into renewed focus.
Companies like Fitbit, Huawei and Samsung have wearable software platforms with much less scope than Wear OS, but these very limitations often help make them feel more responsive. Even Huawei’s much cheaper Band 3 Pro feels faster than the Misfit Vapor X. Sure, the former doesn’t do a great deal, but it does what it can do quickly.
The Misfit Vapor X and other Wear OS watches are not painfully slow, but the real uses for an extra-smart smartwatch are no clearer now than they were in 2014. Okay, apart from smart lights. Controlling those from a watch is neat.
Battery life
1-day battery life
Battery-saving watch mode
The Misfit Vapor X has a 310mAh battery, and its stamina is the dismal Wear OS norm. We find it lasts around 25 hours. This is without having done anything of note. No GPS tracking, no app use, just the occasional brief look at some incoming notifications.
This is at the lower end of the Wear OS norm, only nudging its way into ‘acceptable’ longevity because the Misfit Vapor X uses the always-on screen mode as standard. Turn it off and you’ll be able to squeeze out a few more hours.
At this point, though, the limited distinct benefits of Wear OS arguably just aren’t worth its high maintenance style. Living with a smartwatch that lasts several days instead of one is much easier.
The Misfit Vapor X’s fitness tracking stamina is reasonable. An hour-long GPS-tracked run took 25% off the battery. Faster runners can use this wearable to track a marathon. Slow ones can’t.
There’s also a battery-saver mode. This presumably makes best use of the co-processor of the Snapdragon 3100, as it doubles the battery life to two days. However, it also turns the watch into a basic timepiece. You can see the time and date, but that’s it.
Is there any more proof of quite how restrictive Wear OS is in a real-world sense? The Huawei Watch GT lasts up to two weeks doing all sorts, not just showing the time.
You recharge the battery using a little magnetized dock. This isn’t a wireless charger. It has two little metal prongs that make contact with rings on the Misfit Vapor X’s underside. Charging takes around an hour, which is faster than most competitors.
The Misfit Vapor X is a nice smartwatch marooned on a withered platform. It is comfortable, looks good and has all the right hardware features. But even a new ‘efficient’ chipset can’t drag it beyond one-day battery life.
Okay, you can get two days using a watch-only mode. But if you want a watch that just tells time, buy a watch.
It demands more maintenance, and feels less responsive, than the best lower-tech fitness trackers. And the almost complete lack of progress in Wear OS watch apps over the last year or two makes you wonder if all the effort is worth it.
Who’s this for?
The Misfit Vapor X is for people who want a smartwatch, but not an Apple Watch or one with lower-key smarts like the Huawei Watch GT. The ideal buyer will also need either patience or organizational skills, as it needs charging regularly.
Should you buy it?
Think carefully before buying a Wear OS watch. While this is a mostly fine example of one, its fairly short battery life will likely try your patience. Dead set on Wear OS? The Misfit Vapor X is more expensive than the TicWatch models but is also far more stylish and has a newer chipset.
Most people may be better off with a smartwatch with fewer smart features but better battery life, or an Apple Watch 3. It’s cheaper.