Which Smartwatch is Best For Me?

[asommers]

Looking to buy a Smartwatch but i dont know which one to get. Any recommendations?

I want a watch that...

- Get texts/Calls/Notifications
- Good Battery Life
- Text / Call from the watch
- Water Resistant (Wash hands with/shower)
- Weather?
- Fitness

I use a Moto Z Droid as my phone, price rage under 500

 

[Morty2264]

Welcome to the forums!

I'm currently looking for a smartwatch as well - my advice to you is to check out Amazon and Newegg! You don't have to even spend $500 to get a smartwatch that can get texts/calls, is somewhat water resistant, and has a pedometer/fitness goals tracker. There are some "midrange" devices that work just as well!

I'm currently looking at a Sony smartwatch - the 2, I believe - that does pretty much everything you've stated in your post. I am unsure of its battery life, however. But Amazon and Newegg have a tonnage of different watches and some are more "tech filled" than others - check them out!

If you're looking for a deal, there are some watches there that are under $200 that can do just as well of a job as the flagship ones. But, of course, Huawei and Samsung have awesome watches there that are pricey but great! Just read the specifications carefully to ensure that these watches support Android devices.

Good luck, and let us know what you've decided!

 

[hallux]

You need to define "get texts/calls". Do you want it to be able to be used as a stand-alone or when paired with a phone? Pretty much any smart watch will get notifications of texts and may allow you to answer calls from the incoming call notification on the watch, to actually use your phone for the call.

I can initiate texts and calls from my watch without ever touching my phone, but it doesn't have its own SIM.

 

[kramer5150]

What do you mean by "text / call from the watch"? Do you mean receive text and place calls on the watch through a bluetooth cell phone sync-up?... or do you mean having a watch with a SIM card on board and its own IMEI, dedicated line/number? The two are totally different.

No smart watch with a capacitive touch screen will check off all those boxes. The biggest hurdle across the industry is battery life. At most you're looking at 2 days. I get that with my moto360 Gen-2, 46mm with very very basic, conservative usage. One thing to watch out for is the smaller the watch, the smaller the battery capacity. This is a direct physical correlation. Yet the converse of that is not always true either. You have to read the specs for each. My main reason for getting the larger 46mm moto is the larger battery (and to a lesser degree the easier to read screen)

A stand alone watch (with IMEI and SIM card activation)... by definition will have potential for a very short battery life depending on how you use it. This is the nature of cellular radios, connectivity, data send/receive and the internal microprocessing.

Pebble and vector watch used to be the e-paper battery-life champs (while still being somewhat very feature rich). But its hard to recommend them openly without really knowing how much of the ecosystem fitbit is going to kill off.

FWIW the only watches I would be comfortable wearing in the shower are the Casio and Nixon watches. I have worn my moto in a HEAVY rain downpour, and splashed it many times washing dishes and my hands. Its survived fine, but I would never wear it in the shower