Review of another Casio clone

The Skmei 1381 looks exactly like a Casio DB360 - at first glance anyway. I already owned the Casio and wanted to know how its knock-off would compare. As it is cheap (the current cheapest is £6.12 on AliExpress) it was not a costly affair to find out.

At second glance the (six) buttons of the watches are labelled differently, and indeed have different functions, giving overall just about the same complications. One complication missing from the 1381 is the database complication: the DB360 supports the storage of (phone) numbers, and Skmei quite rightly decided that nobody in their right minds would want this feature on a non-smart watch.

The Skmei is a tad thicker than the Casio, by about 1.5mm. That makes very little difference on the wrist though. The bracelets the watches come with are very similar, the 1381 has a slightly longer one. Build quality of the bracelets look the same to me, but one youtube review claimed the Casio's was better: maybe, but nothing to write home about. I would swap them out. Both watches share the watchband dimensions with the Casio Royale, and there are convex aftermarket watchbands available for replacement. I bought one of those for the db360 and I would do the same for the 1381 if it was lined up for wrist rotation (which it's not).

Both watches come with a decent backlight (hello, F91W), which is indicated on the Casio's case as "illuminator" and on the Skmei's as "el luminous" which is either hilarious or embarassing - your call. Both watches have meager 30m water resistance.

There are a couple of serious differences though. The Casio comes with a 10 year battery, the Skmei with a 3 year one. And: the LCD display of the 1381 is allergic to forward/backward tilting:

Newer Skmei models do not have this issue, but apparently the 1381 has been around for a while and becomes unreadable at a very slight tilt. (Though left/right tilts are unproblematic.)

Because it is a cheap, good-looking watch with decent functionality I cannot really not recommend the 1381, but there are similarly priced Skmeis out there that no longer suffer from the tilt issue.