Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “What’s the Best SmartWatch? – 2019”.
Hey what’s up folks how’s it going! This watch hope you guys are all doing well and today we’re going to be taking a look at four of the best smart watches that are currently available right now, we’re going to be talking about the apple watch series. 5. The gen 5 smart watch by fossell, as well as the samsung galaxy watch active 2 and the versa 2 by fitbit. Now each of these watches run on completely different platforms. Operating system they’re different in terms of form factor style we’re going to talk about each one, specifically, what’s good, what’s bad, hopefully this video will give you some sort of direction into what’s available in the smart watch world right now and if you’re interested in getting a New smart watch – hopefully this will be helpful to some extent, so without any further ado.
Let’S get right into this comparison. Now before we get into specifics, let’s actually do a quick overview of each of the smart watches, we’ve selected. Firstly, when it comes to price point, the apple watch series 5 is certainly the most expensive. The 44 millimeter version starts around 430 dollars.
You can get the 40 millimeter version for around just under 400 dollars, both the galaxy watch active 2 and the fossil gen 5. Smart watch are under 300 and the fitbit versa 2 is the cheapest at under 200. Now, in terms of compatibility, most of these smart watches will work with both ios and android without any major issues. Of course, the apple watch is specifically designed around the ios apple ecosystem, although there are hacks and tweaks where you can make it work and kind of function with an android phone, but it’s sub optimal to say the least and you’re not going to get many of The key features that you are going to get with an iphone connected to an apple watch.
Now, apart from that, there’s actually a lot of commonalities between all four of these watches. They all have oled displays that have always on capabilities. They have fitness and heart tracking. A built-in, via the optical heart rate, monitor they have sleep tracking, although the apple watch does not have native support for that, but you can use third-party applications like sleepwatch to track your sleep. Furthermore, we have nfc payment options available on all four watches, as well as voice assistant and when it comes to a battery life you’re. Looking at the versa 2 fitbit having the best battery life of up to six days, possibly and the apple watch with the worst battery life have typically a day or even less, based on my experience now with the basic fundamentals out of the way.
Let’S talk about each watch specifically to find out how they kind of compare against each other what the advantages and disadvantages are now, firstly, in terms of the fitbit versa 2, compared to the original versa that we looked at last year, that isn’t a huge difference. Essentially, the design has been tweaked a little bit. It looks a little bit more sleeker has an oled display, which is definitely brighter, and it also has a better battery life than the previous version versa. It’S super compact on the wrist.
Only measures around 25 millimeters by 25 millimeters, so certainly the more compact and lightest option out of the other three being a rugged fitness oriented device. It has an aluminum case – that’s actually rated for five atmospheres, so it can go down in water, 50 meters. Deep making. This possibly the most durable smart watch that you’re going to find out there so whether you’re swimming running in the rain, any kind of a rugged base activity you’re going to do outside it should be able to take any kind of punishment like that. Now the versa 2 actually uses fitbit’s own operating system and they do a great job of making the whole user experience as simple as possible. Definitely has the least learning curve out of the other three smart watches.
So it’s excellent for newcomers. The control interface is primarily using the touch display, which is sometimes not as responsive as you would like, especially when you get the thing a little bit, sweaty or wet outside. You do have a large home button and if you hold down the home button, you can enable a couple of different functions. Natively you have amazon’s alexa as a voice assistant, which is excellent in terms of functionality.
Unfortunately, you don’t have a built-in speaker in here. Just a microphone, so you can only really input information and obviously taking calls you’re going to be reliant on a bluetooth, headset or just take calls via your phone directly now, even though the versa 2 may not have the sheer feature set and a technical prowess of Something like an apple watch series 5. It still has most of the features that you’d use on a smartwatch such as getting a basic notifications. You could make a payment using uh fitbit’s own payment, nfc protocol.
We have a built-in sleep tracking capabilities, and since this is a compact overall form factor, it’s actually fairly comfortable to sleep with making sleep tracking an actual feasible option, unlike most other larger, traditional smart watches, which are a lot more cumbersome and more uncomfortable to sleep. With now for me specifically, there are two killer features that the versa 2 offers that pretty much no other smartwatch that i can think of has right now. Firstly, is the ability to actually customize your always on display. So if you go into the settings, there’s actually a whole bunch of parameters that you can set for the always on, so you can specifically set the layout and what you want to see when it’s always on.
Typically, that’s a default choice done by the manufacturer on the operating system on the other watches, but here you can actually see whether you want to see calories, steps time and the orientation everything like that. You can also set off hours which actually turns off the display when it’s not in use, for example, when you’re sleeping or perhaps if you want to turn off you’re watching a specific time of day with uh. Some of these uh combination of features, the versa two can get actually up to seven six days of battery life. Now i haven’t personally experienced that, but four days is pretty much a guaranteed, even in heavy use case scenarios.
Now the fossil gen 5 smart watch is coming from a traditional watchmaker fossil and we actually have the carlisle hr collection over here. It’S done in this smoke stainless steel finish definitely looks the most aesthetically pleasing. Has that classic more traditional watch style? Look now we have a 44 millimeter circular face much like the galaxy watch, but it is significantly thicker and heavier than all of the other watch on at this list definitely looks a lot more traditional. It should be fairly durable.
It has a three atmosphere rating, so 30 meters, deep in terms of water resistance. The overall fit and finish is a pretty nice. We have a matching stainless steel band that goes with it, but you can use pretty much any 22 millimeter band you want in order to get a specific look that you’re going for now the build quality and the previous generation fossil smart watch had a number of Issues mainly some people reported that the back rear panel was coming out after a while. Now i’ve been using this thing for the past couple of weeks and haven’t had any of those concerns to report thus far, but some of the things that i do like about.
It definitely has to be the control interface. It has a digital crown, rotating dial on the side, much like the apple watch and we’re using google wear os and it works much in the same vein as you would expect in apple watch, so you can scroll through the operating system. Some apps don’t work with it. Some do so that’s going to depend upon the developer’s side, but in terms of a native support, uh definitely works really nicely. It’S a great way to interface with the watch. Now.
One thing to praise about is the display. It’S very high quality very bright. The capacitive touch screen is okay, but can be a little bit clunky at times, definitely not as precise as what we encounter on the apple watch. That could be the actual capacitive touch screen, but i doubt it because i pretty much get the same rate of response on the galaxy watch active 2. It’S probably related more to a software issue than a hardware one because much like the tizen platform on the samsung side, google wear os isn’t as well integrated as easy to use and as dynamic. I find compared to the watch os platform on the apple side.
Now, technically the internal performance we’re using the new snapdragon wear 31 processor on the gen 5 fossil. It also has one gigabyte of ram a built-in speaker, bluetooth, 4.1, it’s probably on par, if not just slightly ahead of the exynos 9110 processor found inside the galaxy active 2.. Now, since we’re using aware os, you have a built-in google pay, as well as google voice assistant, which, in my opinion, is the best voice assistant on the planet, for a smart watch is definitely the most useful, especially compared to things like bixby, alexa and even siri, And since we have a built-in speaker, you can actually get the google voice assistant to speak back to you, as well as take things like phone calls and stuff like that now. Lastly, in terms of battery life, i do really like the fact that we have four different modes to choose from, so you have a daily mode, which will basically enable all the different features of the smart watch in extended mode which will actually turn off some of The communication antennas as well as the always-on portion, you have a custom mode which you can choose to turn on and off specific things as well as a time only mode which uh like it sounds, will turn your smart watch into a dumb watch, but will potentially Give you one weeks of battery performance and uh, based on my experience.
I used it in this regular mode and i got 18 to 15 hours of usage. So that’s about 1.5 to 2 days for most people and that’s again with the always on enabled and that’s pretty much on par with the battery life that i got on at the galaxy watch active 2. now in terms of looking at the apple watch series 5 And the galaxy watch active 2. We actually did a separate video on comparing them to specifically. So if you want more details about that, definitely check out that video. You can click on the card, but if we were to summarize some of our previous points, i would definitely say that the apple watch series 5 has the best hardware and software integration. It’S certainly the most technically advanced in terms of some of the capabilities that it has to offer, but there are three major faults that the apple watch series 5 has to contend with. Firstly, is the price point it’s uh, starting at around 400 for just the cheapest? Most basic version of the apple watch and that’s way too overpriced in my opinion, and you can spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on the apple watch if you want to specifically have a tailored designed aesthetic towards it. If you want to get the hermes version and things like that and get the ceramic case and titanium cases, so uh price is definitely going to be an issue, especially on the upper echelon, but even in the cheaper echelon, it’s still a hundred dollars more expensive than An expensive, smart watch to begin with, which is around three hundred dollars now. Another slightly minor fault, is the fact that you don’t have built-in sleep tracking.
You can use third-party applications like sleep watch as we mentioned to track your sleep using the apple watch series 5, but it would be nice to have that built in to watch os. I think fitbit does a really great job of tracking your sleep and, as we mentioned before, the small form factor size makes it a little bit more comfortable to sleep with and uh. The fact that there are dedicated health-oriented bands that you can specifically just use to track your sleep means that there’s a big market for it and something that the apple watch is neglecting right now from a native standpoint. Now the third and probably the biggest concern is to do with the battery life. I pretty much can’t go a full 12 hour days in a lot of cases with the apple watch series – five, it is definitely the worst in terms of battery performance uh comparatively to the other watches on the list. I think you minimally need about a day and a half which is possible with the apple watch, but if you’re going to use any of its core features for a prolonged period of time, you’re definitely going to struggle in terms of battery life.
Now, in terms of the galaxy watch active 2, the tizen operating system is probably its biggest fault and limitation. It feels very clunky and the fact that we don’t have a physically rotating bezel, like we did on the previous generation s3 galaxy and the previous generation galaxy watch that we looked at last year just makes it feel not as nice to use. And although we have the touch bezel interface, where you can essentially replicate that physical rotating dial, it’s still not the same thing and the overall user experience is not as nice to use as the other watches, certainly not as good as the fitbit and uh.
The watch os experience they get on the apple side and even subpar, compared to google’s wear os, which is better integrated and another big fault is the bixby integration. Not only is bixby’s general knowledge lacking significantly compared to alexa siri and the google voice assistant, but it’s also lacking in terms of the voice recognition technology a lot of times. I asked it fairly rudimentary basic questions and i had no idea what the hell i was saying.
So the useful factor of that is uh. Definitely a big drawback. Now the one possible redeeming factor about the active 2 is the fact that, with a future, software update it’s going to have the ability to take ecgs or ekgs. Besides the apple watch, there’s not a lot of fitness, trackers or popular smart watches that are doing that. Right now, so that could be a selling factor for somebody that wants to get the samsung galaxy watch or an alternative to the apple watch while still having the ecg feature, because the fitbit and the fossil watch do not have the ability to take ecg’s now.
In summary, if i had to pick a favorite out of the four, i would definitely say it’s a tie between the versa two by fitbit and the uh apple watch series. Five, i’m leaning towards a diversity in the sense that it costs about half as much, which is definitely a nice thing. Secondly, it has a great integration with ios and android devices and thirdly, the battery life is sensational and you really can’t beat the fact that you can potentially use this thing for about a week’s time and still have some of these smart watch elements integrated in there. In terms of core features, it has everything that you need in terms of fitness tracking, getting your notifications using it as a wallet obviously has built-in sleep tracking, so it has most of your bases covered there uh. Obviously, in terms of a premium smart watch, it doesn’t look as fancy as some of the other watches out there. It’S not really a big fashion statement in that regard. It’S just simple, cleanly laid out and minimalistic in terms of most regards, which is definitely a good thing in my opinion, and if you had to pick a smart watch and you’re new to the game, definitely a top contender in terms of what’s available out there.
But besides that guys, that’s really it. Hopefully you like this video. Definitely let me know what you guys think is the best smart watch out there and uh make sure you have notifications turned on. So you get our videos once they become available check out the links in the description down below for more details about everything we talked about and we’ll see it real soon in the next one. Take care .