People buy smartwatches for a variety of reasons – to develop health habits, track sleeping pattern, and access calls, messages, and notifications on the go.
These watches come at various price points and choosing the right one may be tricky. According to experts, brand, affordability, compatibility, and design should be considered while purchasing a wearable. Users may also look at features such as blood pressure and oxygen saturation monitor, other fitness tracking sensors, wireless charging, display type and size, battery capacity, and the material used to build the device before choosing a smartwatch. To make your life easy, we have curated a list for you:
Budget smartwatches
The budget smartwatches are for price-conscious customers who want to try it out for the first time or use basic functionality such as using call, message features etc.
Fire-Boltt brand talk 2 (Rs 1,299), Realme Techlife watch S100 (Rs 1,999), Realme Smartwatch 2 (Rs 1,999), Noise ColorFit Caliber (Rs 999) and other entry-level ColorFit and Quad watches are the best ones in the category. Basic watches have a price range of Rs 1,000-3,000.
Fitness smartwatches
Xiaomi Mi Smart Band (Rs 2,347) is your go-to if you want a minimalistic smartwatch to count your steps, track walking and cycling. It can show notifications about calls, but you cannot attend the calls with the watch.
Realme SmartWatch 2 Pro (Rs 4,182) is another best watch in the affordable range, which can help you get fit.
Sports enthusiasts and professional athletes may prefer precision in sensors, multiple sports modes, and GPS. Amazfit Bip U Smart Watch (Rs 2,500) and Amazfit T-Rex 2 Premium Multisport GPS (Rs 15,000) are the best smart watches in the mid-range.
Premium smartwatches
Apple Watch Ultra 2 is targeted for pros with a focus on adventure sports applications like trekking, scuba diving and others. It has satellite communication, in case you get stuck in a no-network area. Apple offers free satellite communication for the first two years, later you have to pay to use SoS calls.
Garmin is synonymous with fitness and outdoor sports and they have a wide range for every sport like running, swimming, diving, golf. If you want a general purpose fitness smartwatch from the brand, then Garmin Venu 2 (Rs 57,999) may be a good choice.
You can choose Garmin Epix Pro (Rs 1,23,490) and MARQ Athlete (Rs 1,94,990) if you are an intense athletic person. Garmin has earned the trust and cult-like following similar to that of Apple and users say Garmin's calculative algorithm is the best in the industry.
Apple smartwatches
Apple watch users will have cool features like walky-talk connection, precision finding like searching phones inside the house, hand gestures for custom applications, among others.
Apple Watch Series 8 is the best watch for iPhone users. If you are someone who likes to upgrade to the latest model whenever it is released, then you can go for Series 9 (41mm) (Rs 41,900), but there isn't much difference between Series 8 and 9. If you are a user of an old series like the Apple Watch 5, then you can pick Apple Watch 9.
Entry-level Smart watch for iPhone users is Apple Watch SE (2nd gen) (priced around Rs 23,999).
Other things to look at:
Cellular
The cellular model smartwatches, which can connect to mobile networks and allows you to make calls and use data or apps, even when you're not connected to the phone or wifi. Some smartwatch models will have bluetooth, wifi and cellular variants and you can choose between them based on your needs.
Privacy
Privacy-conscious folks can disable data-sharing to improve the algorithms, though it may hinder the functionality, just like any other place on the internet. So users have to strike a balance between functionality and privacy. When users decline data sharing, on-device computation will happen and your data doesn't go out of device.