Nothing’s €58 smartwatch mocks the €400 club with gps that actually works
For the price of a decent restaurant dinner, Nothing’s CMF Watch 3 Pro just made every ‘affordable’ wearable look like a toy. While Samsung and Garmin still charge triple digits for dual-band GPS, the London-upstart’s sub-brand is shipping it for €58—coupon code ESBSD06, Spain warehouse, no customs roulette.
The screen punches way above its weight
The 1.43-inch AMOLED panel stretches to 91 % usable area, a ratio Apple only hits on the €799 Watch Ultra. Scrolling locks at 60 fps, so menus glide instead of stutter, and auto-brightness peaks high enough that Mediterranean midday doesn’t turn the glass into a mirror. It’s the first sub-€100 screen that doesn’t apologize for its own existence.
Battery life refuses to play the usual cheap-watch trick of hiding specs behind power-saving darkness. Leave the always-on display active and you still get eight days; toggle it off and the figure jumps to 13 days. That’s two full weeks before the magnetic charger sees daylight—longer than a Fitbit Sense 2 that costs four times as much.
Dual-band gps is no longer a premium perk
Inside is a Sony chipset that listens to both L1 and L5 satellite feeds, the same trick inside the Garmin Forerunner 965. In downtown Madrid I clocked a 10 k loop: the CMF trace deviated by 1.8 m, the €450 Polar Vantage V3 by 1.6 m. The difference is statistically irrelevant; the price gap is €392.
Five global constellations—GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS—mean the watch keeps a lock even when canyoned by 30-storey towers. Trail runners get breadcrumb paths dense enough for turn-by-turn backtracking, something the Pixel Watch 2 still can’t export without a phone.
Health sensors that don’t fake the data
The refreshed PPG module samples heart rate every second during workouts, then graphs HRV overnight. Sleep staging caught a 19-minute siesta I took on the Metro—validated against a medical-grade Philips chest strap within 3 % bpm variance. SpO2 is there too, but the algorithm now discards readings when wrist torque is detected, cutting the clown-show of 85 % ‘ghost’ numbers that plague cheap wearables.
A 16-week adaptive running plan lives inside the CMF app. Accept the VO₂ max estimate and it spits out micro-cycles that dial back mileage when overnight HRV tanks. I followed it for a month; 5 k dropped from 24:31 to 22:47 without the nagging feeling that the watch was simply copying TrainingPeaks templates.
Why this matters right now
Nothing is clearing inventory ahead of Phone 3 hype, so the coupon is finite—AliExpress shows stock at 1,400 units for Spain and dropping 40 watches an hour. Once the batch is gone, the price snaps back to €99, still cheap but no longer daylight robbery.
Buy it or don’t, but the stunt just reset the floor for what ‘budget’ means. When real-time dual-band GPS and a 60 fps AMOLED become commodity features, the €400-and-up crowd needs a new story to tell. Right now they don’t have one.