Sports & Fitness Best value smartwatch

Yep!! And a quick scroll through apps...

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Not sure, im sure many do...

 

Have you seen this from Aldi

 

For me, it's too much of an unknown product. Ditto the cheap Kogan ones.
Just for background, I started with a Fitbit Charge 3, simple fitness tracker, great battery life up to 14 days on a single charge. But I was missing an inbuilt GPS with it as I started running up and down the hill next to home and it wouldn't track that activity unless I carried my phone with me, and I don't really want to have to carry my phone when running up and down the hill.

Anyway, so I wanted a watch with inbuilt GPS lasting much longer than 5 hours (e.g. 12 hours) for a full day of activity, and the other feature that had become a must have is the ability for the watch to display navigation (eg. Start a trip plan on Google maps and have directions clearly visible on watch). NFC pay on watch is a plus. Also, I have a preference of a round watch face, I don't like square faces so much. Anyway, first watch I had post Fitbit was the Active 2. Pretty good and I like that I could make and answer phone calls on it but it has terrible battery life.

The next smartwatch I bought was a Suunto 9. Lots of things I didn't like on it. Great battery but the interface was not intuitive, also to make software updates you have to plug it into a computer. What the?! No easy navigation and the screen is pretty ordinary. Also, there is no easy choice for GPS, you the user are expected to know what settings to pick (GPS/Glonass/Galileo?) Btw, the watch is massive, definitely not a watch designed for a smaller wrist. Anyway, I found I could return it (within 30 days of receiving it as long as I had the original packaging and nothing was damaged), so I have, but I am yet to see the refund on my credit card.

So, anyway, next I bought a Ticwatch (E3). I've been wearing both the Samsung Active 2 and the Ticwatch (E3).

For some reason, when using Strava on my Samsung Active 2, it doesn't always pick up all my full rides. E.g. Recording might stop during the ride. Maybe it's relying on my phone GPS? That's frustrating. Or when doing a ride the Active 2 watch runs out of battery by 2pm after having been fully charged over night. Maybe it has improved, but I've had too many instances of issues like this. Plus, I spent $420 for it.

Anyway, I prefer the Ticwatch E3. The watch interface is intuitive and easy to use and it was just $260. It's very responsive. It has a better screen imo than my Samsung Active 2, but I think it's because I have a 40mm Active 2, not the 44mm version. When the next wear OS interface comes out (A collaboration between Google and Samsung), it has been said that this Ticwatch will be able to work with that - it has the snapdragon 4100 processor and it's really fast.

 

Well, that's $50 saved, I might contribute towards good single malt

 

You do not need gps or phone to track activity with even very basic fitbit