U17 Compact thin square smartwatch, suitable for small wrists, Review

The U17 is a nice thin compact smartwatch, Here a collage of ad images with the least faked curvature!

The U17 is a mere 40.55mm long and 35.1mm wide, and thus VERY suitable for small wrists, the bands can even go practically straight down, so can be used on REALLY tiny wrists down to about 3.8cm wide!!! It uses standard 20mm pin bands, So I’m sure that even very small wrists can find a suitable band.
(Punching one or more extra holes in the rubber band it comes with, could get it to go down to a wrist circumference of 11cm ).

The display is 35.75mm long and 31mm wide so only 2.4mm top/bottom bezels and just 2.0mm side bezels. This is very good, so despite the compact size it gets a screen coverage 78% – impressive!!! AND the glass is just 39.1  x 33.65mm So the bezels under the glass are even more impressive over 84%!!! The side bezels under the glass are 1.3mm!!, and ‘thicker top/bottom bezels under the glass are less 1.7mm.

It its quite thin too. 9.4mm at the ø2cm protrusion (with slanted edges – see profile image below), and 8.2mm outside. it is slightly curved (MUCH less than their ad-renderings claims!!) ending at 7.4mm at the top and bottom. So just 0.8mm thinner there, matching a curve radius of 39cm, and that is quite flat for a watch….
The display follows the slight curvature of the glass.

Here I placed the actual watch on its retail box so you can see the difference between the real curvature and the faked ad-renderings.
Note that the back is basically flat (except the protrusion sticking 0.8mm out), but on their fakes it looks like it is concave.

The ad renderings also looks like faking the active display area higher, but as mentioned it actually IS covering an astonishing part of the area

The above image is with a flash, so the reflection does not catch the colour correctly, but it is more deep graphite or gun metal than “black”.
I just happened to had ordered a titanium band in almost that colour, fitting it nicely

The aspect ratio of 15:13 is a bit unusual, but though I personally prefer a watch to be round, I do admit that the rectangular (this is almost square) shape are better for displaying content on the watch.

Firmware wise they should be praised for the quite rare thing that it allows to set date and time from the watch

I would also like to praise them for having all weird nudging switches off by default, only wrist-raise was on

AOD-wise they only offer two pre-installed ones, one analogue and one digital.

You can select what health-stuff it should monitor, but you can not choose the frequency on any of them. The Heart Rate seems to have a rather coarse frequency of each 5 minutes

The sensor in the centre ‘window’ seems to consist of eight tiny areas in a 2×4 grid, I have not seen that before and wonder if that can give it some extra info comparing the signals? (zoom in on this not overly sharp image)

It is quite light too with 19g, though it does not have a flimsy feeling to it.

Here a detail showing the band corner:

It is supposedly IP68, I’m not sure I would dare test that, I would certainly not try it for swimming.

I bought it here with another item for just $16 (less taxes and shipping), so it certainly gives a lot for the money!

Drain

Apart from the usual features they added a Drain feature!! It is intended to shake out any water that has entered, by the use of the vibrator and speaker. I have no idea if this actually works, but an interesting approach.

App

It uses H-band, and well it is neither the best or the worst out there, and the 3.7 in the Android Market seems fair..

It only offers 132 watch faces currently – and it take sort of forever to get that list 12 at the time….

Only a few I found appealing, but at the least I found some, and even more than one, no way to mark favourites though, so have to re-find any you liked to change…

The watch offers stress monitoring not supported by the app it seems, so you can not see any graphs here. 🙄

There are no settings for how coarse the monitoring should be. The HR seems to be at 5min

Sleep

It got the sleep duration almost perfect, but the details are nonsense.
It is not that common to get the overall length right, and most have nonsense-details, so fine by me.

It’s included in a small sleep-test I did here.

Health

It offers HearRate monitoring every five minutes, so not super fine, but should do the job for monitoring people at rest or walking.
And from what I’ve seen this far, it seems to do a fair job.
Obviously being that coarse it will not catch any ‘spikes’, but should be able to tell the overall trend, if the heart rate is too high or low.

It offers a lot of other things too, but I have no idea of the quality of those. HRV, SpO2, MET, Stress, and the highly dubious and most likely outright fake BloodPressure and BloodGlucose.

Here some of the fake BG claiming I eat three daily mails – that practically never happens…

at 2025-09-29 it was at the charger between 19:45 and 2140, and they just draw a smoothed curve over that period…

Battery and charging

It was almost fully charged, but I tried to charge it anyway, and strangely it quickly reduced the current all the way down to 10mA, and I gave up waiting at 93%..
It charges with just 114mA  at around 30%.
It was charged 2025-09-29 at 21:40. 2025-10-04 at 17:25 it is at 27%. But I had forgot to to disable the useless “BG monitoring”…
So retrying it is at 100% at 2025-10-04 21:00, and at 2025-10-11 21:00 it is down to 7%, so it lasted a week with a slight amount left after all.
ADD: Vibrates and reports low battery at 5%, less than half an hour later at 21:37… So connected it to charger 21:40, and at 23:10 it is at 91% after an additional half an hour it is at 92%(!), and didn’t wait up for it to finish, but it did finish over night… So as it charges quite quickly below 90% I guess I would recommend to just make it a habit to charge it whenever you take a bath, and that should keep it well charged – unless you do really short (ore rare) baths.

Bezels

Here a compare with the T8_ultra and the H06, where the the 50% larger display in a more compact body really shines!

And as a rare thing you CAN use a coloured face that does not fade into black, without it looking horrible like the T8_ultra to the left….

Here with some faces that fades into black, where bezels generally are less horrible. (to the left T8_ultra and center H06 looks ok)

The display of the more compact U17 is 25% larger than the H06, and as mentioned over 50% larger than the T8_ultra – amazing for such a cheap one!

I dug up the box with the DM75 and did a compare, as the U17 offers a twice as big a display!

Small wrists, U17 versus DM75.

For small wrists the DM75 is the least I know of out there, with the ø35.9mm body. BUT it is not as easy a win as just that versus the 40.55mm length of the U17, as the DM75 has a proprietary band going outwards, the U17 allows the band to go directly downwards (or outwards for large wrists), making it MUCH better fitting various wrist sizes!

Here the two walking tight rope on a lamp:

I tried to mount them on a small cream tube less 11cm(!) in circumference

And yes the U17 sticks out more in the ‘corners’, BUT it is actually the DM75 that is hoovering the most on the ‘arm’:

And here the difference in thickness also (literally) makes the DM75 stick out. And the light curvature also helps the U17 here.

Obviously you would cut the excess band if you got such a small wrist, or for the U17 perhaps find another band, as it uses standard 20mm pin bands. The DM75 uses proprietary bands, so you are really stuck with modifying the band it got.

And obviously the twice(!) as large display of the U17 talks in its favour

On the other hand round is more aesthetic pleasing for a watch (at the least in my book), and it is less likely to get bumped, despite sticking out more due to the thickness.

Specs

Taken from here.

Conclusive remarks

This certainly seems like the most interesting option for smaller wrists available in 2025. And in my opinion also more interesting than the slightly smaller DM75, due to a better and slimmer design.

Sure it is not the best out there and I expect to stay with my current favourite the longer ø41mm H06 – but it certainly seems worth the money, and a nice watch for those that got a narrow wrist, especially considering the minute price..,