Smart watch market analysis. In his studio Casey tries a 180 on a OneWheel. Tech review Tuesday. Which smartwatch is the best smartwatch. Apple Watch, Garmin, Samsung... but before: context. On a sheet of paper Casey shows the smartwatch spectrum. Dumb watch telling the time. On the opposite, a tiny computer, and in the middle, some fitness focused watch and galaxy watch. When choosing a smartwatch, the first thing to take into account is how much a pain are they versus what they offer in returns: Burden.The more it does, the more a pain in the a*s it is. The 3 he uses are the Apple Watch, The Garmin Fenix 5+ and The Samsung Galaxy. Build, ecosystem, capability, battery. A regular watch too as a control. The Garmin is very tough, all metal, crystal screen. The Apple Watch is more a piece of jewelry but great build quality. The previous was not very tough it exploded. The new galaxy watch feels very solid, more than the previous gear series. Best build:Garmin. Ecosystem: Garmin, some faces and apps but they are not super robust. Some ecosystem but not great ecosystem. But good for fitness and communicating with Strava for example. The Apple watch strives there. The fourth generation has now lots of apps. The Galaxy has also an impressive ecosystem with Android, but proprietary Samsung apps. Works great because they only have to support Samsung watches. Samsung also allow third party watch faces, Apple no. Capabilities: there is no clear winner, it depends of what you want the watch to do. A watch watch is also very good if all you need is to know the time. Then the Garmin gives the bare minimum smart features but has all the fitness capabilities like heart rate, distances, maps. The Apple watch is a mini iPhone strapped to your wrist. Casey stopped to used one because it is too much. You don't need all the functionalities Apple offers. The Samsung also packs a lot of things, you can even watch YouTube videos on the watch! But the interface is really good: round watch and the apps are around the screen and you use the round dial to pick the app you want to use, very intuitive. Touching and navigating on the Apple watch is much harder: tiny dial on the side. Judging the capabilities of these watches is very hard because quantity, the amount of things you can do is less important to the user than how well it can do the few things that are important to you. The 3 smart watches are similarly good when it comes to capabilities, the Garmin does a few things very well, the Apple and Samsung do a lot of things but will you use them? Last: battery life. A regular watch last forever compared to any smart watch. The Garmin with a full colour screen but low resolution last about 2 weeks. A little less if you use the GPS a lot but it is impressive. The Apple watch is told for 1 full day but can last a bit longer. The Samsung lasts about 4 days. Conclusion. It is very hard to objectively judge a smartwatch. It all depends of what you want it to do. What is exciting is that they are all good and they continue to improve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GpXYRcBZYc
