Nothing CMF Watch 3 Pro: A damn near perfect $99 smartwatch

I’ll admit, I initially judged this smartwatch by its good looks. It’s sleek, modern, minimalist, boasts an OLED display, and certainly doesn’t look like a cheap smartwatch. However, I was suspicious given its $99 price, which drops to $79 when on sale. But as it turns out, Nothing's CMF Watch 3 Pro is awesome. There's a reason Mashable recently named it one of the best smartwatches of the year, alongside much more expensive wearables from Apple, Samsung, and Google Pixel.

Please, no one tell Nothing they should be charging a lot more for this watch.

We’ve come to rely on smartwatches for much more than telling the time and keeping track of our daily step count. Modern smartwatches are also supposed to be fitness trackers, sleep trackers, GPS guides, and all-around coaches, reminding us to stay hydrated or stand up from our desk and stretch. These features, and the watch’s display, also love to suck up battery power, the bane of any fancy smartwatch. But CMF has some kind of magic recipe because the battery life on the Watch 3 Pro is something else. Apple Watch users who charge every day will be envious of this watch’s power to last for almost two weeks — and even longer in my experience

The overall look of the CMF Watch 3 Pro is impressive, and it comes in a diverse range of colorways. I’ve been testing the orange option, but I’m also smitten with the light green. Take note that the colorways change not just the strap but the watch’s bezel.

Here’s an initial rundown of the specs of the CMF by Nothing Watch 3 Pro:

Specs

CMF is Nothing's budget brand (which will soon be spinning off into its own company), but this smartwatch's specs don't scream budget:

• Screen: 1.43-inch AMOLED glass display

• Peak brightness: 650 nits

• Resolution: 466 x 466

• Refresh rate: 60 fps

• Battery type: Lithium ion

• Battery capacity: 350 mAh

• Battery life: 13 days with typical use

• Charging time: about 100 minutes

• Weight: between 51 to 52.4 grams, depending on colorway

• Water and dust resistance: IP68

Standout features I love on the CMF by Nothing Watch 3 Pro

When Nothing launched the CMF Watch 3 Pro, one of its most noteworthy upgrades was the dual-band GPS. That’s accurate enough to track your position down to indicating which side of the road you’re on. 

It also comes with all of the basic fitness and health tracking we’ve come to expect from a smartwatch — heart rate monitoring, blood oxygen level, stress level, daily steps, and even VO2 max. After a workout, the Watch 3 Pro provides detailed metrics like total time, total calories, and a heart-rate graph. It then further breaks down the heart rate into intervals of warm-up, fat burning, aerobic, anaerobic, and maximum. For those new to a sport, those metrics are useful to stay within a reasonable range while ramping up fitness. The Watch 3 Pro also pops out an estimated recovery time so you can better plan your next workout effort.

Beyond health and fitness tracking, I’ve found a few features that I like to brag about, like the fact that the weather widget includes outdoor AQI. As someone who’s kind of obsessed with breathing in clear air, I appreciate this addition. There’s also the remote camera function that allows you to control your phone’s photo shutter via the watch, timer included. This is gonna be handy when it comes time to take the holiday card photo. I’ve also used the watch’s guided breathing as a calm-down exercise because the world is a lot right now.

Getting sporty with the CMF Watch 3 Pro

The Watch 3 Pro is all-inclusive when it comes to sports. It has over 130 sport modes, and that means it includes some outliers that we don’t always associate with traditional sports. Some of my favorites include hula hooping, kite flying, scooter riding, jet skiing, and luge. Notably, bobsledding is missing; sorry to disappoint the Jamaican team. But silliness aside, CMF went deep into fitness here to even include individual exercises like planks, push-ups, and sit-ups.

Runners, walkers, hikers, and cyclists will appreciate the watch’s dual-band GPS tracing, which can even tell which side of the road you're on. 

Runners and aspiring runners have a special advantage with the CMF Watch 3 Pro. There’s a custom running coach feature that asks for your target distance (such as 5k or 10k), desired completion time for said distance, and how long you have available to train. From there, the coach asks how many days per week you plan to train and when you’ll begin. Before it spits out a training plan, it asks for a trial run that needs to be at least 12 minutes long for the AI trainer to accurately give users the best training plan.

While this is a pretty snazzy feature, I’m not sure asking a newbie runner to head out for 12 minutes is reasonable. This feature also seems stuck in kilometers, despite my watch being set to miles. Like all AI, this feature doesn’t seem flawless, but it’s neat to have available regardless.

A battery life your friends will envy

Nothing says the watch will get about 13 days of battery life with average use. That shrinks to 17.2 hours with continuous GPS use but can go up to 60 days in power saving mode. When testing, I used the watch to receive and reply to texts, track workouts, automatically detect and track walks, and track my sleep. I kept heart-rate monitoring to check every five minutes.

To test the battery life, I charged it 100 percent, and after 13 days, when Nothing said it would probably die, it was still at 45 percent. So, I turned on more notifications and enhanced sleep tracking. With those, I started losing about 6 percent battery per day, which puts me in line for about 16 days of battery life. For reference, Mashable Senior Editor Stan Schroeder found the Apple Watch Series 11 to be a “one-and-a-half-day smartwatch."

Nothing says with heavy use, the Watch 3 Pro should last for about 10 days. Paired with my experience, that seems like an honest number.

Recharging the watch takes about an hour and a half, but that doesn’t include getting the charger connected to the watch itself, which always took me several attempts. It’s a finicky proprietary magnetic charger that basically forces you to set the watch face-side down to recharge. It’s also nearly impossible to move the watch or pick it up to look at it while it’s charging without knocking the charger off the watch. It’s a set-it-and-forget-it situation that I don’t love.

Sleep metrics that are similar to a $3,000+ smartbed

I tested the CMF Watch 3 Pro at the same time as I was testing the Eight Sleep Pod 5. The Pod is a bed system that consists of a mattress base, blanket, and mattress cover that tracks sleepers’ metrics and makes small temperature adjustments throughout the night to maximize sleep quality. In a queen-size, the Eight Sleep Pod 5 cover alone costs about $3,300. Adding the blanket and base brings it closer to $7,000.

I compared the sleep metrics the Eight Sleep Pod gave me each night to what the Watch 3 Pro said. To my surprise and delight, the two were nearly identical. Sure, a few minutes are different here and there, but the overall reading was similar enough that I’m left feeling like the sub-$100 CMF watch I’m wearing on my wrist is tracking my sleep in a way that rivals a $3,000+ smartbed. 

For example, the Eight Sleep Pod calculated my REM sleep at 28 percent while the Watch 3 Pro said 25 percent. The Eight Sleep Pod clocked my deep sleep at 23 percent and the Watch 3 Pro said 26 percent. The CMF Watch 3 Pro also tracks naps automatically, and that’s not something all smartwatches can brag about.

The sleep metric readout on the Watch 3 Pro does reveal one weird quirk about using the Nothing app. I've noticed some odd language choices and small typos. When checking my sleep score, I found text that read, “Your sleep quality is very high and you are in good spirits and should be maintained at all times.” That gets the point across, but it’s not really a standard English sentence. When I set my custom running coach, the app told me to select a “later tine” when I chose a start date in the past.

Personally, I’m not mad that the CMF Watch 3 Pro has some slight lost-in-translation moments, but other people might find this to be a turnoff. Fortunately, a future update could easily fix these issues.

What I didn’t love about the Watch 3 Pro

Right off the bat, I was shocked by how large the Watch 3 Pro was on my wrist, and it’s only available in one size. I consider myself a "medium" size woman, and my wrist measures about 6.5 inches around. The 1.43-inch display pretty much covers the entire front of my wrist, leaving very little of the watch band visible. I’m not mad about this. I like the chunky size, and I’d much rather have a larger and easier-to-read display than a smaller display. It’s water-resistant, but I have to take it off after a shower to dry it off because the face is simply too large to shift around enough on my wrist to dry on its own.

I suspect the size will disqualify this smartwatch as a good option for most kids and maybe even some teens. You might also dislike it if your wrist is much smaller than my 6.5-inch wrist, but this is all subjective. Despite its larger size, it’s lightweight and I hardly notice wearing it.

Another negative some might find to be inconvenient is the lack of NFC payment options. No, you won’t be able to pay for that Trader Joe’s snack run by tapping the CMF Watch 3 Pro to the payment terminal. I have Google Wallet on my phone, so this wasn’t a big issue for me but some might find it to be.

Bad news for ChatGPT fans

When the CMF by Nothing Watch 3 Pro launched in July of 2025, the Internet was pretty jazzed about its promise of allowing you to have access to ChatGPT on your wrist. Well, turns out that was a little bit of a bait-and-switch.

This feature is only available if you pair the Watch 3 Pro to your Nothing phone. If you don’t have a Nothing phone, you have no wrist-accessible ChatGPT, sorry to say. Maybe this’ll change in the future, but for now, this ChatGPT feature is probably worth well, nothing to most people.

Is the CMF by Nothing Watch 3 Pro worth buying?

When I first saw the CMF Watch3 Pro, I thought it looked damn good for a watch that’s under $100. Now that I’ve worn it for several weeks, I think the performance is on par with its good looks. The watch feels, looks, and functions like it costs a few hundred dollars. And its features are incredible given the price. The long battery life makes this an even better deal, and I think it’s perfect for people who are just dipping their toes in the world of smartwatches or those who value a good deal while not sacrificing quality.

In the past, I’ve been heavily on team Garmin, but my Garmin lives in a drawer now, and its battery life was nowhere near as solid as the CMF Watch 3 Pro. The functions are awesome for athletes, and I’m blown away by the sleep tracking accuracy. I think it’s well worth the $99 price tag, a ridiculous deal if you can snag it on sale for $79, and probably about a third of what it should cost.