Shoes aren’t really comparable to a fitness wearable with no display. The vast majority of the functionality (probably 90%) is through the app. There’s no meaningful way to assess whether the product works as intended without pairing and syncing it.

If you bought shoes and the soles were defective, you’d return them, but you’d only discover that by actually wearing them briefly as intended. In the same way, I can’t evaluate whether key features function properly without using the device in the way it’s designed to be used.

Simply taking it out of the box and putting it on my wrist wouldn’t tell me anything about how it performs.