Smartwatches are a type of wearable tightly related to Internet of Things. The present form of the smartwatch is hardly 6 years old with some of the smartphone-like abilities and some special ability. The most important part of a smartphone is its display. Most of the future buyers of smartphones have some common questions. Mechanical watches and the hybrid luxurious watches have the resell value typical of the costly watches.
Understanding the need, we have researched the market, used a few of the models and written a longer article on the topic divided into two parts. Why and when you will buy a smartwatch? Maybe just because you need a new watch or have some memorable occasion or just because you are a watch collector. We can say to divide smartwatch category into three parts – (i) cheap (good for nothing) (ii) mainstream (companion of a smartphone) (iii) luxurious watches (watches from the real watch manufacturers). We will mainly discuss the “mainstream” (Samsung, Apple are their manufacturers). We will cover a separate section for the luxurious men’s watches.
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The Truth About Today’s Latest Smartwatches
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Most of the cheap smartwatches are unusable for a basic reason – high-resolution circular displays are costly. Based on sell and users reviews, watches from certain manufacturers are of high quality. The brands are Samsung, LG, Apple, Nokia, Motorola, Xiaomi, Asus, Titan, Fossil, Skagen, Diesel, Tag Heuer, Louis Venetton, Patek Philippe, and so on. Any grown male will tend to find a “real watch” with extra functions, not something which has a UI of a smartphone. Luxurious smartwatches do the job perfectly. Indeed, you can gift the later category to your gentleman father.
If the display is not of higher resolution, the “watch faces” do not appear realistic. Unfortunately, the bottleneck of the present smartwatches is battery life. For different reasons, battery technology has not yet grown as much unlike the display technology, microprocessors, RAM and microcontrollers. One of the question many of the future buyers ask is longevity. Mechanical watches typically used to last for decades to centuries with proper care. The actual longevity fell when the automatic watches came in the market. It will be near impossible to find the parts of today’s automatic watch just after 50-60 years. Comparing with mobile phones, it does not appear to us that today’s smartwatches will be serviceable just after 20 years. In essence, a smartwatch likely to remain usable for a decade, unless you want only the watch feature.
Smartwatches from the luxurious watch companies are the overall winners for an excellent combination of a traditional watch with the digital world. We will separately discuss the real men’s watches. Within this part of this article, we will limit our discussion to the mainstream watches. They are the funkiest companion of a smartphone made to look like costly watches.
The operating system of these smartwatches are commonly WatchOS, iOS, Android, Tizen (open source), Fitbit and some are the proprietary OS. It is important to note compatibility with smartphone operating system. It is practical to choose an Android-compatible smartwatch which has an open-source OS.
Expected Hardware of the Smartwatches
Display : Usually they are AMOLED, with Gorilla Glass exactly like the smartphones. You should note the PPI of the display. Below 300 PPI the display not going to look realistic. Samsung Galaxy with 392 PPI became near comparable with the luxurious watches.
Connectivity : Minimum Bluetooth, WiFi are expected. It is better to have NFC. NFC does the faster job with your smartphone. Many of the smartwatches now have SIM card slot supporting LTE. It is a great feature as it makes the watch independent.
Chipset : Usually the common models have 512 MB RAM, 4 GB storage, 1.2 GHz processor. Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear is a well-known chipset for the smartwatches. Snapdragon Wear has Adreno 304 GPU. Samsung uses own chipset.
Sensors : Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Altimeter, Ambient light sensor are the usual sensors.
Other hardware features are probably obvious – music playing capability, camera, speaker etc.
Conclusion of this part
If you want to look like a punk then there are of “fitness watches”. Simply because most can not fund the purchase by winning some US Casino, investing $400 to $15,000 behind a smartwatch does need some guides which are honest, unbiased by any kind of sponsorships from the manufacturers – unlike the smartphones, the smartwatches still can be perceived as wastage of money.
Samsung did the best to watch the world and phone world. Samsung Galaxy does not look like a punk, it can deceive as a normal watch, have enough apps. It does need a bigger wrist. The cost of Samsung is not huge unless you want LTE, the user base and support is widely available. It is not easy to think of Fossil. The chipset can be Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear but the thing is not made to easily fit with Samsung’s smartphones. That difficulty forced us to make the mainstream (funky companion of a smartphone) a separate category from the luxurious watches. Samsung smartwatch or Apple Watch is not precise like the luxurious smartwatches. Chipset manufacturers are inclining towards selling to luxurious brands.
What makes the luxurious watch different is the preciseness of time and inability or difficulty to make/receive a call. They are more towards precise watches with extra features such GPS than just a companion of a smartphone. In the next part, we will discuss the luxurious smartwatches. Click here to read the second part of this article.
