A smartwatch sounds like a good idea and once on your wrist you’ll never want to be without it. But you may not need one after all.
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Smartwatch or not?
If you have an iPhone and you want a smartwatch, the choice is easy: you buy an Apple Watch. It works well and every year a new version is released. As an Android user, the choice is not that easy. If you use a Samsung, you will probably take a Galaxy Watch, but you can also go for a Fossil, Garmin, Fitbit or another brand.
So far, nothing can match the ease of use and number of apps on an Apple Watch, but that may be about to change. Wear OS 3.0 is coming. The huge update of the operating system was made this time in collaboration with Samsung and can also be used for the first time on the new Galaxy Watch 4. Watches that now run Wear OS 2.0 will only receive the update at the end of next year.
So it will all take a while, but Wear OS 3.0 seems to be the way to kick the smartwatch market for Android. With more apps for the Samsung Galaxy Watch via the Play Store, better battery life and a faster interface for everyone. But do you really need it?
Broken
I’ve been wearing a smartwatch for the past few years and it wasn’t long before I couldn’t live without it. It’s so convenient to see all the notifications from your phone on your wrist. You don’t have to look for your phone for every sound and then look disappointed at a dull email, because you can see that at a glance on your watch and then you go on with your life.
Other functions are also quickly indispensable. Like that I see a picture on my wrist when someone presses my smart doorbell, or I can take beautiful pictures of myself by using my smartwatch as a button. My heart rate and workouts are also neatly tracked, as are the countless other health functions that current smartwatches have.
But then my smart watch fell on the bathroom tiles and the screen was broken. Repairing turned out not to be an option, but the wearable still worked well. For nearly another year the handless watch ticked on. Only more and more pieces of glass fell off the screen until the watch gave up the ghost a month ago.
white spot
So for the past few weeks there was a clear white spot on my arm that was otherwise sun-tanned, because I always wore a watch outside. A constant reminder of what I no longer had.
However, after a month I also see the benefits. Not always having to read every notification at all times and not always being able to be directly accessible, gives quite a lot of peace of mind. At first I thought I would appreciate the tranquility only during the holiday season, but I am not. It’s pretty healthy to step away from the technology in our lives sometimes, and a smartwatch won’t allow that.
Notifications and other functions can of course be turned off so that, for example, you only use the health functions, but then a smartwatch feels like an unnecessarily expensive purchase. Perhaps the new one Fitbit Charge 5 a golden middle ground will appear at the end of this month. This fitness tracker looks more and more like a smartwatch, but notifications usually look so bad on Fitbits that you don’t even want to use them.
What is your impression of Wear OS 3.0? Are you going for a smartwatch now, or not? Let us know in the comments.
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