Which smartwatch: Apple or Galaxy?

BitDepth#1436

Mark Lyndersay

BUYING A smartwatch should always start with the question, "Do I need a smartwatch?" And that question should be tempered by the understanding that a smartwatch is not a replacement for a traditional watch.

Even the most basic smartwatch is capable of keeping time and displaying it, but that's not really its primary function and buying one just to do that is, to be frank, a waste of money.

You can keep time with a cheap plastic watch as easily as you can with an expensive Rolex or Bulgari. The only thing a smartwatch has in common with either of those is that it will lose its value only slightly less slowly than a budget timepiece.

A smartwatch is a wrist-worn computer with useful sensors that links to your smartphone. Like your smartphone, it will eventually be obsolete junk and you will leave it behind in a sad, abused heap like all the silicon you use today. It is not an investment. It is a tool, so be sure you plan to use it that way.

If you aren't in the habit of wearing a watch, it's probably a good idea to start your smartwatch journey by trying a cheap device. A smartwatch is not jewellery and to make the best use of it you need to get comfortable with wearing it continuously to extract all the value of owning it.

A cheap smartwatch (less than US$100) is essentially disposable, but after about a month you should have a sense of the value of wearing it continuously.

By my second week of testing Samsung's Galaxy Watch 5, I was sold on the idea.

Early smartwatches were useful for occasional use, but a wrist-worn computer I didn't have to think about beyond keeping an eye on its charge status was something of a revelation.

It wasn't any big thing, but rather a flurry of very small things that made wearing it almost continuously worth the initial discomfort for this watch novice.

Among the positives? Not needing to reach for a phone to see who's calling. Being notified by alarms and timers that signal via haptic vibration instead of screeching audio. Getting encouraged to meet daily distance walking goals continuous step counting during the day. Pondering the relationship between my sketchy sleeping and the data recorded by the device during the night.

Samsung has worked hard on the integration between its smartphones and its smartwatches and the quality of that communication will grow more robust as Google develops its new Wear OS.

But there are cons. You can answer a linked smartphone on the Watch 5, but the connection is poor and calls are largely inaudible. The notification system needs lots of work. Text messages show up on the smartwatch, but the system is blind to WhatsApp text and calls. Lap swimming definitely needs some tweaking. It records times and estimated calories burned, but no accurate tally of laps. Huawei's 2016 Fit delivered far more accurate swim tracking.

The Apple Watch, by comparison, was introduced in 2015 and has been through nine hardware versions and ten operating system revisions. The polish shows. I tested the Apple Watch SE 2, essentially an upgraded Apple Watch 8 that doesn't have the new fancy finger tap gesture control.

Some differences jump out immediately.

Apple's gallery of watch faces is anaemic compared to what you can get for a Wear OS-based Galaxy smartwatch. While Samsung has its recommended suite of watch faces, there are at least a hundred more, many of them deeply inadvisable, to be found on Google's Play store.

I like what are called complications on the digital watch face (and this may be more revealing of my character than it should be), the little buttons and widgets that link to deeper watch functions or give you running updates.

Beyond date and time, I like to see battery status, media playback and phone controls.

Notifications on the Apple Watch appear to be tied to Apple's notification system for MacOS and iOS, so summaries of e-mails, social media posts and WhatsApp messages flow in by default.

Both devices have their advantages, but the key deciding factor will really be which phone you use. The tightest and most useful integration between wearable device and smartphone will always be found in the ecosystem they were designed for. Got a Samsung phone? Get a Galaxy watch. Same with Apple.

If this seems like an unnecessary Balkanising of what should be open choices, it's just the way it is and these companies will continue optimising for their home brand.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there