While waiting for my personal angel, I decided to see what happens on the wearable market. First of all, it is a mess. Second, it is an unholy marketing disaster. Why? Because the shiny-whiny pages of those tiny smart devices are huge, fancy and can show you the world and your perfect image of self, but NOT the precise and detailed specifications of the gadget you want to buy!
Other problems are the lack of unified measurements and a whole lot of subjective stuff around those devices.
But if I’m going to empty my pocket, then I better know why. So this is my try to make sense of the mess around activity wearables.
Disclaimers:
- The list of devices is everything else, but complete.
- It may contain false information, since I tried to dig some of the information from unofficial product websites. If you find errors, please comment and I’ll try to fix them asap.
- All measurements are as objective as possible. I tried to not include subjective measures as GUI, device design, errors, support, etc.
Since at the end every decision depends on the user’s personal preferences and needs, I hope that this table will help you and help me to take the optimal purchase decision faster. Decide what you need and see which gadget fits your needs.
For example, the most important features for me are:
- water resistent, so I can swim with it
- must measure heart rate
- must monitor my sleep
- must have > 3 days battery life
- wearing style: wrist
break tie criteria (nice to have):
- skin temperature
- open source, so I can write my own apps
- level of automatically switching between modes
- smart wake-up alarm
Things I don’t care about:
- smart notifications, because I have more than enough smart devices to ignore at the moment
- music control
- big fancy screen