After smartwatches and smart rings, I think screenless fitness bands could be the next wearable category to get serious attention in India. A lot of that interest started with people discovering Whoop and its approach to tracking health and recovery without putting another screen on your wrist. Now, several India-based brands are trying to bring a similar idea to a much wider audience. One of them is Ubon with the SW-211 Maxfit.
Maxfit takes the screenless approach quite literally. There is no AMOLED panel, no touchscreen and no temptation to constantly check another notification on your wrist. Instead, it focuses on collecting health and fitness data in the background and pushing it to the companion app. Ubon is also pitching features such as HRV, stress and recovery tracking, more than 100 sports modes, long battery life and, importantly, a zero-subscription approach.
On paper, this sounds like exactly the kind of wearable I would want after spending years surrounded by screens. But I also wanted to see how much I can actually trust the numbers. So, during my time with the Maxfit, I compared several of its readings with those from my Apple Watch Series 12.
As a technology journalist, I am so used to having a screen on my wrist that wearing the Maxfit felt strange initially. There is no display to glance at, no touchscreen to swipe through and no notification panel demanding attention. At first, I missed having all of that. After a few days, however, the absence of a screen started to feel rather soothing.
The Maxfit itself looks fairly premium at first glance. My review unit had a black band paired with a metallic bronze-coloured panel, which gives it a more expensive appearance than I expected. The overall grip is good, and I never felt that the band was going to slip off during normal use.
The strap quality is decent, although I did run into one annoying problem. After taking a bath, the material tends to remain wet for quite some time. Wearing it immediately afterwards can make the band feel itchy against the skin, which isn’t something I particularly enjoyed.
The other issue is the size of the sensor assembly. The Maxfit isn’t particularly cumbersome during the day, but the sensors make the underside feel slightly bulky. I didn’t have much trouble wearing it while working or going about my day, but sleeping with it was less comfortable.
That is worth mentioning because sleep and recovery are supposed to be among the biggest reasons to buy a wearable like this. If a band becomes uncomfortable at night, it can defeat part of the purpose.
There is also a physical button. A single press lets you check the connection status and battery level through the LED indicator, while a long press can initiate Bluetooth pairing or manually start and stop workout tracking. You can also hold it down for a few seconds to power the device on or off. It is a simple system, and I didn’t really miss having a touchscreen once I got used to it.
In fact, the screenless approach ended up being one of my favourite things about Maxfit. Whenever I wanted to check my metrics, I simply opened the Da Halo app instead of looking at my wrist. It removed one more source of distraction from my day.
Sleep is one of the areas where the Maxfit feels more useful than its relatively simple hardware might suggest. The Da Halo app gives you information such as awake time, sleep latency, sleep efficiency and the timing of your sleep. It then uses these metrics to provide an overall sleep score, which generally sat between 65 and 80 during my testing.
The presentation is easy enough to understand, but there is a limitation: the app mostly tells you what happened rather than why it happened. You get the statistics, but there isn’t much explanation about what caused the score or what you should change to improve it.
I also compared the sleep data with my Apple Watch Series 12. The broad picture was often similar, but Apple’s tracking felt more precise and detailed. The Apple Watch gave me more context around my sleep, and when the two differed, I found myself trusting the Apple Watch more.
For someone who simply wants a broad picture of their sleep without paying for a subscription, the information is useful. But if you are expecting a detailed recovery platform that can tell you exactly what is affecting your sleep, this isn’t quite there yet.
HRV is probably the feature that made me think the most about how health data should actually be presented to consumers. During my testing, the Maxfit reported HRV values in the low 20s, ranging from around 21ms to 25ms. When I compared that with my Apple Watch Series 12, the Apple Watch was showing readings around 50ms.
The important thing here is that HRV isn’t a universal number that should be compared blindly across different devices. Measurement methods, timing and algorithms can all affect the result. So I wouldn’t call the Maxfit’s reading inaccurate simply because it was lower.
But there is another problem: context. If I had been wearing only the Maxfit, seeing an HRV value in the low 20s could have been quite concerning. The app does show the HRV pattern, but my readings remained around the 20ms range and there wasn’t enough explanation to tell me what that number actually meant for my recovery.
This is where I think Ubon needs to do more. Health wearables are increasingly becoming devices that influence how people think about their bodies. If a device is going to tell me that my recovery is poor or my stress is high, it needs to explain the data rather than simply displaying a number.
Maxfit’s HRV tracking is an interesting addition, but I wouldn’t use it as the sole basis for making decisions about my health. For a health-focused wearable, the interpretation layer is just as important as the sensor itself.
Heart rate was a different story. For normal day-to-day activity and resting heart rate, the Maxfit was surprisingly close to my Apple Watch Series 12. The two generally went hand in hand, which was reassuring. I did notice more differences during exercise, however. The Maxfit’s heart-rate readings weren’t always as close to the Apple Watch when I was actively working out.
The same mixed experience extended to the other basic metrics. Blood oxygen readings were broadly similar between the two devices, while step counts and calories were reasonably close but not perfect.
During a roughly 2,000-step walk, the difference between the Maxfit and Apple Watch was around 200 steps. That’s not disastrous for a casual fitness tracker, but I expected better considering the Maxfit’s entire proposition revolves around collecting fitness data in the background.
Calorie tracking was closer, and I didn’t notice a particularly large difference between the two devices there. The Maxfit supports more than 100 sports modes, which sounds impressive on a product page. In practice, however, the workout information I got was fairly basic. The feature is useful if your primary goal is simply to log that you exercised, but serious fitness enthusiasts will probably want more detailed information and better analysis.
The number of sports modes is therefore less important to me than what the band actually tells you after a workout. Having 100-plus modes is useful for categorisation, but it doesn’t automatically make the underlying fitness tracking more useful.
Because there is no screen on the band, almost everything important happens inside the Da Halo app. Thankfully, this is one area where I came away fairly positive. The app is clean and easy to navigate. The first page gives you the activity tracker, and scrolling down takes you through Daily Tag, Sleep, Workout, Heart Rate, Blood Oxygen, HRV and Stress.
There are also dedicated sections for Activity, Sleep, Sensors and Account Details, so you can dig deeper into individual metrics.
I particularly liked the overall Daily Recovery score. Unlike some of the individual metrics, it actually felt useful because it gave me a simple way of understanding the data collected by the band. It doesn’t overwhelm you with information and gives you a quick snapshot of how the day is looking.
However, some of the underlying measurements didn’t inspire the same confidence. The stress tracking, for example, consistently stayed in the 20s during my testing. I didn’t find that particularly believable, especially because the number seemed to remain in roughly the same range regardless of how my day was going. Again, this isn’t necessarily proof that the sensor is inaccurate, but it does make the metric less useful to me.
Workout records were fairly basic, and syncing wasn’t always instantaneous. There were times when I had to wait for the data to appear in the app, and sometimes it did not appear.
Ubon claims up to 30 days of active battery life and up to 60 days of standby time. I obviously couldn’t validate the full 30-day claim within a review period, but my real-world results were good. I started my testing at 100 per cent, and after roughly a week of use, the battery was down to 48 per cent. I also found charging to be reasonably quick. After plugging the Maxfit into my laptop for around 20 to 25 minutes, the battery increased to 68 per cent.
This is exactly where removing the screen makes sense. You don’t have an AMOLED panel constantly consuming power, so the Maxfit can concentrate on collecting data rather than powering a display.
For someone who hates charging their smartwatch every day or two, the difference is good. You could realistically put this band on your wrist and not think about charging for days at a time.
At around Rs 6,000, the Ubon SW-211 Maxfit finds itself in an interesting spot. It is not trying to be another budget smartwatch, and that is actually its biggest strength. The screenless design is refreshing, the battery life is genuinely impressive, and the Da Halo app gives you a decent overview of sleep, activity, heart rate, HRV and recovery without forcing you into a subscription. For someone who wants a wearable that quietly tracks their day without becoming another source of notifications, there is something appealing here.
But at this price, I expected the tracking to be more convincing. The HRV readings were consistently much lower than what I saw on my Apple Watch Series 12, the stress score rarely felt believable, sleep tracking lacked useful context and workout data was fairly basic. Even step tracking wasn’t as consistent as I would have liked.
The bigger problem is that Maxfit’s screenless approach only works when the data underneath is trustworthy and useful enough to make you want to open the app. In my case, it wasn’t always.
The Maxfit is a good first step towards making screenless fitness trackers more accessible in India, but at Rs 6,000, it still feels like a product with a great idea that needs another round of refinement. I would wait for a price drop before recommending it.