The Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 is one of just a few truly interesting Wear OS watches. Sure, it still suffers from the usual pitfalls of the platform. Battery life is dismal if you actually use it freely, and its fitness functions fit into the software rather awkwardly.
However, it has meaningful software additions for hikers. Casio has also added modes for those who like to fish, and kayakers. But the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 makes most sense for hikers, ramblers, walkers, fell runners and other on-foot adventure activities.
As with the previous generations of Casio WSD watches, you’re left wondering why you shouldn’t just go and buy something like a Garmin Fenix 5 Plus, though.
To make the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 last long enough for a weekend of trekking you have to limit its features, and only use navigation sparingly. And just like the Casio Pro Trek Smart WSD-F20, the charger is infuriating enough to get a mention right at the beginning of this review.
In terms of fit and look, at least, the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 is a major improvement over the WSD F20. Casio has slimmed down the casing to make wearing one a far less embarrassing spectacle.
The watch costs $550 (£449, around AU$900). That makes it one of the most expensive Wear OS watches, but a chunk cheaper than the Garmin Fenix 5 Plus at the time of review.
Design
- Slimmed design
- 5ATM water resistance
- Military spec tested in nine areas
Casio’s main design goal for the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 appears to be “make it smaller”. We were not fans of the WSD F20’s oversized look. And while this follow-up is still large and bulky, it seems more a chunky watch, less a plastinated funeral pyre for some middle-aged man’s dwindling testosterone and hairline.
There’s still plenty of macho bravado to the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30, though. Great big shiny bolts on its sides appear to be part of the strap hinge, but are not. The buttons on the side are aggressively embossed, and the strap has a carbon fiber-like effect that’s just a pattern inlaid in silicone.
Yes, Casio is out to put on a show here, and it makes a Garmin Fenix 5 seem tastefully subdued in comparison.
However, let’s not forget Casio is a bit of an underdog in this space. If an ultra-rugged look helps it sell the WSD F30 as a tough watch, fair enough. We feel much less self-conscious wearing this than its predecessor, and it’s marginally more comfortable too.
If you’re into the bold look, you can go further too. Casio makes versions of the WSD F30 with blue and orange highlights.
The watch has great rugged cred to pair with the appearance. It offers 5ATM water resistance, making it suitable for swimming and some water sports, but not diving. It is certified to some of the US military’s MIL-STD-810G rugged standards too.
This consists of 28 tests for different conditions, and Casio says the watch has been checked to meet nine of them. These are the standards for shock, vibration, humidity, low pressure, high temp, low temp, temperature shock and ice.
Its website also says, “The device has been tested to perform under test conditions, but is not guaranteed to operate under all conditions in actual use.”
This line likely protects Casio from any warranty claims based on ‘failed’ ruggedization. However, the spec does cover the most important real-world bases, those of low temperature and temperature changes.
One other factor is worth noting, though. A couple of years ago 5ATM water resistance and MIL spec adherence were extremely expensive features. Nowadays cheap trackers like the Honor Band 4 have 5ATM, and the has both 5ATM and some of the MIL spec ticked off.
Of course, the tougher the casing is, the less likely the ruggedization is to fail after, say, a year of being bashed around.
The Casio Pro Trek WSD F30's shell is tough-feeling plastic aside from a plate of stainless steel on the back. And all the buttons and bolts on its sides are metal, not silver-painted plastic. The display surround is, sensibly, raised too. This should help avoid scratches on the display glass.
Screen
- Dual layer screen, OLED and monochrome
- 390 x 390 pixel 1.2-inch circular OLED
- Auto brightness
Wear OS is not a natural fit for a hiking watch. The poor battery life of this platform means you could quite easily kill most Wear OS smartwatches within a good day’s hiking.
This is why the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30’s additional screen tech is essential. It has a dual-layer display. There’s a 1.2-inch OLED of 390 x 390 pixels for Wear OS use, and a transflective display on top.
It’s closer to the kind of LCD used in a traditional digital watch. It looks clearer on bright days, where the OLED layer competes with ambient light.
Efficiency, not clarity, is the aim, though. It uses far less power than the OLED layer.
The best way to use the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 day-to-day is to make it show the low-power display until you either tilt the watch to your face or interact with the touchscreen. However, this also limits the watch faces that look ‘right’.
Casio has packed in a few of its own. There are imitations of big, chunky analog watches, another that shows an ultra-zoomed-out map of your location in the background.
However, to make a smooth visual transition between the two display layers, you have to use the ‘2 layers’ watch. This makes the OLED mimic the simple digital characters of the upper layer.
This may not be the tech-soaked vision you imagined for a smartwatch, but in our opinion this is the way to use the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30. It also makes the watch seem less ‘fake’, an issue with many Wear OS watch faces.
You can choose between orange, blue and white for the color of the OLED’s characters. And there are two modes. Daily shows the time and either the battery level or your steps. Outdoors displays the time, altitude and pressure.
As these stats can be harvested from low-energy sensors, the barometer and accelerometer, you get to see them in the non-OLED display too. The two-layer screen style paired with the '2 layers' watch face is one of the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30’s most successful elements.
This screen architecture does seem to hit the OLED’s visibility slightly in very bright sunlight. However, the max backlight level is just about strong enough to compensate and there’s an Auto Brightness setting. Outdoors visibility has been improved since the WSD-F20.
Battery life
- Typical Wear OS 1.5-day stamina with full ‘smart’ use
- Up to 30 days as a ‘dumb’ watch
- Extend mode lasts up to an optimistic 3 days
Using the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 as we have, letting it switch between the two display layers freely upon any kind of interaction, the watch lasts around a day and a half. We still saw around this stamina with a 30-minute tracked run around the local park.
The Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 also has an Extend mode that you have to use to eke out the kind of performance needed for a weekend of walking up some hills. This is a semi-disconnected mode you set up before heading out for a trek.
You choose intervals for the watch to GPS track your location, and make the watch download a certain map area for offline use. It lets you use both the color and monochrome screens to check out map and digital compass.
However, the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 won’t actually interact with your phone to receive notifications and other data because Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are switched off in Extend mode.
Casio says it can make the WSD F30 last up to 3 days of trekking. However, this assumes very little checking of the map, or active use of the watch, and a lax GPS internal rather than the ideal (although not really necessary for hiking) every-second GPS call. If you want to actively navigate using the watch, you’ll ideally want to recharge each night.
If the battery runs out on you, the watch reverts to the monochrome-only display rather than blacking out completely. This is yet more proof of the value of that second layer. Half the smartwatch owners we know walk around with a depleted watch tied to a wrist, acting as nothing more than a dead weight some of the time.
You can also use the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 as a basic monochrome-only watch, again showing either your steps or altitude. Casio says the battery lasts up to a month like this. For those who want a hiker’s watch and have little interest in the smart side, this is a pretty good way to live with it between activity weekends.
We’re a little surprised Casio hasn’t done anything to improve the charger with this generation, though. Like last time, the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 uses a magnetic plug that hooks into a terminal on the watch’s side.
Similar to a MacBook MagSafe adaptor, it’s designed to disconnect when knocked, to avoid any damage to watch or charger. However, the connection and the magnets are so weak, it doesn’t take much more force than a gust of wind to make the charger fall out.
Plug it in overnight with the watch resting on a rucksack and there’s a very good chance you’ll return to it disconnected, the battery barely replenished.
The entire charger design is bizarre. Instead of using a phone-like solution, there’s a figure of eight lead, a separate power brick and the charge cable. This seems overkill for a puny power supply. It just takes up more room in your rucksack.
Charging is also slow. It takes up to three hours.
Tracking and trekking
- Handy hike features
- Offline on-watch maps
- No real recorded history of your routes
The Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 is quite different to other exercise tracking devices, most notably those from Garmin. Most, if not all, are designed to record your activity. They let you look back over your routes after the fact, in the form of maps, stats and graphs.
This isn’t the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30's aim. It’s not really into 'tracking' in this sense. Casio wants you to use this as a tool while you’re actually hiking or, at a stretch, fishing. There’s a lot of software baked-in here, but the companion phone app doesn’t actually record your route for posterity.
If you want that, you’re much better off with a Garmin Fenix 5 Plus or Etrex Touch 35.
The Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 offers a set of tools, and easy-access on-watch maps. This is where the two additional buttons on the watch’s side take you.
Those tools are compass, altimeter, air pressure reading, tide times and a screen that shows the sunrise and sunset times. None of these require particularly advanced sensors, but the Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 makes these stats quicker to access than most other Wear OS watches.
Mapping is perhaps the most important feature, though, particularly as very few dedicated sport watches actually have full maps. Even the expensive Garmin Fenix 5 Plus makes you download expensive custom packages to do the job properly.
The Casio Pro Trek WSD F30 offers Google Maps and Mapbox maps. You can switch between the two, and pick satellite, terrain and standard views.
There’s 4GB of storage inside the watch, and it lets you save five different circular areas with a diameter of up to around 25 miles each. While entire baked-in countries would be ideal, this kind of flexibility is still excellent as you can pick areas anywhere across the world. And there’s no extra cost.
Looking over maps on watches in never the best experience. And here there is a slight delay when you initially fire-up maps.
However, it is reasonably quick and clear on the Casio WSD F30’s OLED screen, and flicking across them using the touchscreen is intuitive. The watch uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100 CPU, capable of running Wear OS fairly well, though this chipset is a bit dated now.
When you actively track an activity, you have five options: Trekking, Fishing, Cycling, Paddle and Snow. Casio couldn’t say “this is not a runner’s watch” more clearly. Each has its own distinct tracking stats.
Trekking it all about elevation. Fishing lets you log your catches on the map. Cycling predominantly shows your speed, as does the kayak-friendly Paddle. Snow logs your number of mountain runs, total distance over those runs and stats like max speed.
And the Movement Setter part of the watch lets certain events cause corresponding actions, like showing the altitude for every 1km of a climb, or the distance whenever you stop on your bike. This is set up via an app, which we discuss more below.
Having used the Casio WSD F30 for a while now, though, it continues to feel fiddly. A tracker watch like this works best when its features are wound around a custom interface. Wear OS is not the perfect home for them, as different parts exist as separate apps. General navigation is, like all Wear OS watches, a little awkward too.
App and features
- No heart rate monitor or NFC
- Has a mic for smarter Wear OS uses
Casio’s companion app is very limited. It’s called Movement Setter, and lets you choose the tools you’ll see in the WSD F30, as well as set up the rules that fire off on-screen alerts during exercise.
However, that’s it. If you want to track runs, and get any insights into your performance, you’ll need to use other third-party apps.
This need not be a deal-breaker, though. The Casio WSD F30 comes with Google Fit pre-installed, which is more than capable of tracking runs. And you have other options such as Strava too. That Casio has stepped out of this high competition area is probably for the best.
The hardware also limits the kind of tracking you can do, though. There’s no heart rate monitor. This watch has no idea of your exertion level, which we consider a must for any kind of training tracker.
We also can’t quite grasp why there would be no appeal for this among hikers. Wouldn’t it be fun, or at least interesting, to see how fast your heart was beating along that particularly steep climb?
There are arguments against this tech-ification of hiking, of course. But if you’re keen on those, you probably won’t want a smartwatch at all. A phone with offline maps could easily do the job for any navigation emergencies.
Outside of the pure fitness tech, the Casio WSD F30's feature list is patchy. It has a mic, which is fairly impressive considering its 5ATM water resistance. Long-press the main side button and you can talk to the Google Assistant.
However, it does not have NFC so can’t be used for contactless payments.
The Casio WSD F30 is much easier to live with than the last model. It’s smaller and the screen is clearer in sunlight.
It also remains one of the few Wear OS watches that doesn’t seem like ‘just another’ smartwatch, the same as all the rest in a different shell.
However, most keen hikers would probably be better off with a Garmin Fenix 5 Plus. Its maps may not look as nice, but it requires less upkeep and does radically more with the data it collects.
Who's this for?
The Casio WSD F30 is the best Wear OS watch for outdoorsy types more interested in getting out into forests, mountains and hills than scoring a new personal best in a 10K run.
It has a bunch of useful features for the purpose, like offline maps, and solid integration of a compass and altimeter. The added software is some of the most meaningful you’ll find on a Wear OS watch.
Should you buy it?
Longer activities like hiking push at the limits of Wear OS battery life, and many of you may be more comfortable with one of Garmin’s tracker watches. However, you need to spend big to get on-watch mapping, a feature of the Fenix 5 Plus.
Such a watch is less hike-centric, but can ultimately do all the same things, and actually logs your hikes properly for posterity too.
The Pro Trek WSD F30 also seems a little pricey, with the added software feeling relatively thin next to the platforms of the established dedicated exercise trackers.
First reviewed: January 2019