I was gifted this over the holidays, at the end of 2024, as the G-SHOCK DW-H5600 had been on my ‘want’ list since it came out. I wear a smart watch like this when I sleep, as it is my alarm (vibration) and general sleep tracking, and I use this to workout in the mornings. That’s the extent of my smart watch use, but the appeal of the DW-H5600 is that it also looks like any other G-SHOCK, which gave me a lot of hope that I could wear it casually as well.
Seven months into owning this watch, and I have no desire to get any other smart watch — this watch has been fantastic. Not only is this a very good G-SHOCK, it’s perhaps the best of the smart watches I have tried. Good tracking, features, and synchronization, while not looking like a dumb screen strapped to your wrist.
Specs and Functions
There’s a lot going on with this watch from a feature perspective, so I am not going to do an exahaustive list. I’ll just highlight some of it. Let’s start with the specs: 51.1mm x 44.5mm x 17.4mm in a bio-based resin case and band with carbon core guard structure. The big thing here on the dimensions is the thickness — it’s thick and there’s no way around that, even for a G-SHOCK.
Some of the bells and whistles:
- Mobile Link via Bluetooth:
- Auto time adjustment
- Watch setting control
- Notifications from phone
- Training analysis
- Sleep analysis
- ‘life log’ and activity details
- phone finder
- 200m water resistance
- Solar charging and charging from supplied USB-A type cable
- Heart rate measurement
- Blood oxygen measurement
- Sleep measurement
- Step counts
- Activity tracking (training, running, walking, and other)
- Vibration and tone alerts
- Battery life: 35hrs max under activity tracking with heart rate monitoring; about 1 month with no heart rate monitoring active; and 11 months max under power saving mode (without any exposure to solar charging).
It’s a G-SHOCK and does all those things, with a little added smart watch to it.
Wearing and Performance
The first thing to get out of the way with this watch is the size. Like most G-SHOCKs, this is not a small watch by any means, though typically a G-SHOCK wears a lot better than you expect. This watch faces up nicely on your wrist, not looking over powering in size. The Achilles heal here is the thickness of the watch — it is bulky and some sleeves will simply not drop easily over it. It’s thicc.
From a sizing and wear perspective, that thickness is the only downside. Because, like all other G-SHOCKs, this also wears weirdly comfortably. Casio found a good formula with their watches and they’ve stuck to it here, even with the extra sensors in this watch.
But, there’s another downside to this watch: the interface is cumbersome. To control the watch you can do that from both the watch itself, or the mobile app when the watch is paired. Neither option is fast or smooth — though I will note that I find this to be the case with every smart watch I have used. This watch is slightly harder to control on the watch, as the buttons are smaller to press, and for G-SHOCK lovers the configuration of the buttons feels a little off for me. However, you can configure the watch in such a way where the stuff you use a lot, are fast and easy to get to such that I’ve not had any issues. I can start my workout without looking, and start timers I use for stretching very quickly. The one thing you cannot do easily on the watch is edit, and toggle, alarms.
What you need to know about this watch is that this is really not the watch for someone who is very serious about tracking their health and fitness. It’s a watch for people who want a classic looking G-SHOCK with a few extra tracking features to keep an eye on things. In other words: pretty much custom made for a person like me, who loathes most smart watches.
I’ve been over the bad stuff, and that’s really it, but before we dive into the really good stuff I have a few notes for those thinking about this watch:
- This watch can be charged on the provided proprietary charging cable, or via Solar power. I’ve not had much luck with the Solar aspect on this watch, though I generally am only outdoors with it for about an hour per wear. It does work, but you’ll need to be outdoors much more. I plan on taking it as my go to watch for the next backpacking trip to see how it really fares, but for now I would say that the solar works to help lengthen battery life, not maintain it. It does charge quickly on the charger (under an hour or so), and I found that battery life in general is about a week or so for how I use the watch.
- There’s only two modes for HR monitoring: always, or during activities and sleep. I would love to turn this off for sleep, as the green LED for the HR monitoring is rather bright if the watch moves slightly out of position. Right now, you cannot turn it off for sleep without disabling the HR monitoring entirely.
- As with a lot of watches like this, there’s no repeat on the alarms. So you can have the alarm on or off, but you can’t set a “weekdays” alarm or “weekends” alarm. This is really annoying for me, but also, kind of refreshing in that it lets me keep a better schedule. I still would like a schedule here.
- The vibration on this watch is quite strong, so it works very well for me as my alarm, and I do notice when it vibrates during a workout. It can be loud as well, as you hear the buzzing. This is the right tradeoff from the vibration being too timid.
- There’s only a few different workout modes, so it won’t cover highly specific cases, but it’s mostly tuned to track your output, not specific performance by sport/activity.
- The sleep tracking is totally fine, and very consistent, as is the activity tracking.
- The connection via bluetooth to the app is very good. I rarely have issues with the app not getting data before I open it, and it almost always connects quickly to the phone. The data pull is fairly quick and it all integrates with Apple Health as well.
- There are only a handful of actual configurations you can have for the watch face, and I do wish there was a lot more here. You can set defaults for different activities and also swap between layouts on the fly during activities.
Ok, let’s talk about why this watch is really fantastic.
The first is the MIPS display which G-SHOCK has slowly been adding to its watches over the last several years. This display gives you a very sharp and crisp visual, while allowing the layout to be more fluid than the past LCD style displays. The time is large, and even with a negative display setup, highly readable in all lighting conditions. You can see this with polarized sunglasses, or in direct sunlight. The illuminator means you can easily read the watch at night, and the 1.5s (configurable) backlight option means that you won’t be tapping your toes waiting for the light to turn back off.
This watch tracks what I need, and doesn’t waist my time with other things. So many smart watches these days have resorted to adding loads of gimmicks to their data views, in a desperate attempt to lock users into their proprietary bullshit. Whoop makes an entire business out of this. Here, Casio takes a rather sane approach. There’s three cards I see each day:
- Activities: a quick summary of the activities I took for that day.
- Life Log: showing my steps taken; and kcal burn for the day.
- Nightly Recharge: showing my sleep time, sleep charge, and ANS charge. This is really the only gimmicky part of the watch in general.
The watch can monitor blood oxygen. It can do a breathing exercise with you. But you can also do absolutely none of that and never be pestered by it. I can turn off all notifications coming to the watch. The only time this watch vibrates is when I need to know something: wake up, timer going off, or hitting a mile marker on my ruck. Otherwise the watch is simply a watch.
And that’s what makes this watch so lovable to me. It looks like a G-SHOCK, and for the most part it acts like a G-SHOCK. Solar power, 20bar water resistance, a deadly accurate bluetooth synced time packaged in something that dares you to try and damage it.
Toss this on and head to a backyard party and a friends house, and you’re wearing a normal digital watch — not being distracted by your last text message, or Apple telling you about it’s next movie premiere. Wear it on a hike, and you won’t be distracted by navigational prompts, but you’ll get an idea of your pace and HR.
It’s comfortable, classic looking, and performant.
Overall
This is, in every way I can think of, my perfect smart watch. The menu and controls are cumbersome enough that I never can get sucked into the watch. Yet there’s just enough features here that I can get a few data points I care about when I am working out, or sleeping.
It’s fantastic.