If it wasn’t already painfully obvious by now, I’m a massive nerd. But some of my weird nerdiness extends beyond the usual nerd culture things like games, movies, and tv. I take my hobbies like art, code, coffee, language learning, etc. pretty seriously. But sometimes my seriousness extends to inane things like smartphones, smartphone setups, and watches. I’ve always been into watches, ever since I was a kid. I had various digital watches and sports watches, and a few analog watches. 2 years ago, I had a big moment where I didn’t want to upgrade my original Galaxy Watch and switched to an analog watch. That is, until I was allured by a great deal on a Galaxy Watch 5 a few months later and got sucked back in. Alas, such is life.

But I’ve been using smartwatches for about 5 or so years and have flip-flopped between them and analog/digital watches (“dumb” watches). A part of me loves smartwatches, but another part of me isn’t impressed and thinks there’s much more room for improvement. So here are my thoughts about the pros and cons of a smartwatch vs “dumb” watch. The goal of this blog post is to evaluate the value of the promises made by smartwatches and if they deliver on said promises in a meaningful way.

A smartwatch is a mini smartphone on your wrist. It tells the time, displays notifications, and has a limited selection of apps you can use, all while being on your wrist. Lately, the health features have been the major selling point of smartwatches. First it started with fitness tracking, but now they even have EKGs and sleep apnea detectors built into them. It’s almost like watches are saying “you cannot live without me”. 

Then there’s the “Ultra” series watches. First Apple created the Ultra and now Samsung has just released an Ultra watch of its own. The main selling point of those is for advanced sports/hiking/outdoor activity. The Apple Watch Ultra series supports diving functionality, specialized compasses, and offline maps for hikers. I’m clearly not the crowd for that and I think most people aren’t, so I won’t talk too much into those watches.

Apple’s smartwatch prices range from $275 for low-end models like the Apple Watch SE to the Apple Watch Ultra 2 at $799. For reference, an iPhone 16 is $799. The “standard” that they probably expect most people to pair their new iPhone with is the Apple Watch Series 10 at $399.

Some quick math here shows that the expected value of an Apple Watch is approximately 50% of a new phone, or at its lowest price point, the watch is 35% of the base phone.

What about Samsung or Google? Well, to save a lengthy amount of typing, they’re priced similarly to Apple. There’s some undercutting here and there from Google and Samsung, but the overall value structure is very similar, with the watch being about 35-50% of the phone. A watch will cost you close to $300 without tax on the cheaper side or close to $400 without tax on the average side, to the high-end Galaxy Watch Ultra at $650. In fairness, that’s $150 less than the Apple Watch ultra 2, but I don’t think that’ll change anyone’s opinion on Android vs iOS and impact their choice in watch.

Analog watches can range pretty significantly in price. If you need accurate timekeeping, you can just get a Casio F91W-1 for $22.95 via Casio’s website. It’s a famous and vintage look. I picked one up while I was in Japan for like 20 bucks recently, and it’s very nice considering its price. It’s very lightweight, comfortable, handles date and time, has a light-up display button, has an alarm and a stopwatch built into it as well. I think it’s pretty stylish as well, with a bit of a retro feel to it.

I also have two Fossil watches. They look nice despite /r/Watches claims, they’re made better than you’d expect and can be quite affordable at close to $70-150+ per watch. Also, not bad!

So for my use case, regular watches are much cheaper, but I do get that there’s a whole world of luxury watches that can easily place a watch much higher in price than a smartwatch.

I enjoy using my smartwatch for fitness purposes, specifically running. I mostly use it to keep track of my heart rate and avoid “over-exercising”. I try to keep all my runs between 140-150 bpm and to stay in aerobic zones. But importantly, how accurate is the heart rate sensor to begin with? Allegedly fairly accurate, but the devices constantly warn you that they’re not medical devices and shouldn’t be used to judge medical health. Either way, I can tell if I’m over exercising even without the watch, it’s pretty easy to tell if I’m tiring myself out or pushing myself too hard. If you care about heart rate, you can buy specialized heart rate monitoring straps that are apparently more popular with professionals and only cost $50-120, so you wouldn’t need to shell out $275+ for heart rate monitoring.

I’m not sure if it’s the same with Apple, but at least on a Galaxy Watch you need to manually select most workouts that aren’t running/walking/swimming, so it’s not perfect for all workouts. If you’re running it’ll automatically detect it so you don’t even need to press anything. You can save 2–3 workouts as a watch tile, so it’s easy to manually enter a few workouts, but anything beyond that requires manual selection via the workout screen. You can enter that mode if you set up an input like double tapping the home button. This is a problem if you like to lift weights and do specific weight workouts, as you spend a lot of time selecting different workouts.

ECG detection is kind of cool, I’ve asked my cardiologist about it, and he said he didn’t feel they were useful. I don’t think it replaces seeing a regular doctor and the heart monitor that doctors use is likely a better way to judge heart health, so overall the value proposition isn’t super high here for me, but I can see how it’d be useful for some people.

I think heart sensing had negative value for me as well because I have experience with health anxiety and overanalyzing results (even though I have no medical training) is a serious problem I have a history of struggling with. I think the smartwatch was a trigger for my panic attack in 2022 because I was checking my heart rate a lot and worried the results indicated a bigger problem. 

The watch can bug you to get up if you’ve been stagnant too long, I found that feature extremely annoying and disabled it. I get up fairly regularly, and I also work out 3 times a week, but maybe for some people it reminds them to get up.

Step tracking is one of the fun novelty features I used to motivate myself during my more stagnant days. I don’t need to keep track of my steps, I go out enough and work out, so again, a bit of a useless one for me too, but it’s kind of fun to look at after a long day out. “Oh, we walked a ton today! 13k steps!”

Sleep detection is something I’ve used a few times, but I also know if I’ve had a good or a bad sleep. I’m not sure if I need my watch telling me and honestly the watch is a bit uncomfortable to keep on when I’m going to bed, so I feel like that it negatively impacts my sleep. I don’t wear it to sleep much, and so I don’t use the snoring detection features or anything.

Importantly, all of this is logged in either the Apple Health app, the Samsung Health app, or in Google’s case, the Fitbit app. These logs are something I enjoy using/looking at because it helps me see how often I’ve run, or if I’m making improvements in my speed/distance. This is a convenient feature to help reduce the amount of manual logging you need to do, but then there’s the problem of interoperability. Google has partially solved this within the android ecosystem with the Health Connect app, but you’re still not going to be able to cross Android/iOS barrier.

I do want to highlight a funny incident that still impacts the Apple Watches. The Series 9 had blood-oxygen monitoring, but after a patent lawsuit they were forced to remove it. Something to keep in mind if you buy a watch for a specific health feature or app, it isn’t guaranteed to exist forever!

So overall, I have two major uses for the watch’s health features, but most of the other stuff is either useless or fluff to me.

Notifications on your wrist is one of the major selling points of a smartwatch. I find it useful when I’m on the subway and sitting down with a bag on my lap. Sometimes I’ll get texts, and it’s nice to not have to pull out my phone to see them, especially in the winter.

Here’s the UX if receive a text and don’t plan on replying:

Receive text -> Lift arm to read the text.

Where things fall apart is replying. I’ve had several different smartwatches over the years, and the keyboards are not great for typing. It’s oftentimes easier to respond back by pulling out your phone. This gets into the UX part of this, but here’s a more typical flow:

Receive text -> Lift arm to read the text -> Decide if going to reply -> Decide if reply is too long to type on the watch. It then branches into either pull out phone and reply, or try to type with the watch and hope it doesn’t get messed up. This is a 5-step process.

I tend to pick the former, which is part of the reason I wrote this post. Here’s how a text situation would work without the watch.

Receive text -> Pull phone out of pocket/bag -> Decide if going to reply -> reply or put back into pocket.

This is a 4-step process. So on paper you actually save a step, which is the decision if you’re going to pull your phone out.

There’s always an alternative UX flow that I’m trying to make use of more:

Receive text -> check it later because you don’t need to be always connected and reply immediately to everything

Having a buffer between yourself and the phone in the form of a pocket can be beneficial in this case, as the effort of pulling a phone out of a pocket can be a good deterrent.

The actual UX of the watch is a bit confusing as well, it’s essentially a two-handed device for actual use. You’ll need to hold your wrist up, and then your opposite hand is used to operate the screen. It’s much slower than the average smartphone, so opening an app can take twice as long as a situation where you might just take one hand, pull the phone out of your pocket, and then click the app you need.

Surely that can’t be something that’s difficult for smartwatches, can it? Direct sunlight and off-axis viewing are both issues for smartwatches, but direct sunlight is the achilles heel. The Always on Display (AOD) can often not be bright enough in sunlight to be visible, requiring the screen to be activated, and even that can still be hard to see depending on  your watch face. This isn’t a problem for analog or digital watches, they’re perfectly visible in direct sunlight. At night, a smartwatch is great because it’s easily visible. I think besides the direct sunlight issue, there isn’t a problem here, but you’d be surprised how often you need to check the time while in direct sunlight and it ends up “breaking your immersion” so to speak.

Smartwatch battery life will last you a whole day, but it does drain a lot even without much use. If you completely gimp your watch and don’t use useful features like AOD or tilt to wake, you can end up with a pretty decent battery, up to 2 days. A typical day for me starting at 7 am with AOD/Tilt to Wake, 35 minutes of working out, and reading various text/notifications, I’ll end the day at 10:30 with 35-45%. Essentially, it’s a 1-day device and needs to be charged at the end of the day for the next one. With battery degradation, I could see this battery being a problem in 1–2 years.

I noticed the AOD was the highest drain on the battery, up to 23-26% at times. That’s a bit rough tbh, especially since I’m not looking at it the majority of the time. For reference, my S23’s AOD after a full day of use is 5-7% of the phone’s battery. I still feel like for something you glance at 5 or so times a day that 5-7% is a waste, so I no longer use AOD on my phone. But with a smartwatch, not using AOD leads to various problems like not being able to glance to check the time. This can be a problem if tilt gestures don’t work properly), or if your watch hand is holding something and you can’t tilt it. Hopefully in the future AOD technology gets better and we start seeing closer to 5-7% drain from AOD rather than 20%, because that’d make a huge difference in battery life.

This brings charging into the equation, but oftentimes when I’m traveling I need to bring an additional charger with me for the watch, so also something to think about if you’re trying to travel light.

Analog watches batteries are kinda nutty, a watch with a good battery can last years. The Casio watches I mentioned have 7-year battery life, but even my fossil watches are rated at 2-3 year battery life. Watch battery replacement can be a pain, but it’s not too hard to find places that do watch repair, or you can do it yourself if you know what you’re doing.

This is the crux of the issue I have with smartwatches. Sometimes things go wrong. Apple Watches were recently updated to deal with battery drain and touch screen issues, prior to that release beta testers were dealing with frozen devices (which I get that they’re beta-testing so that’s on them), but you can’t have a bad update ruin your analog watch. Personally, I haven’t had any major issues with big software updates,  but I’ve experienced plenty of minor glitches.

I ran into a bug when I was in Japan last year. My watch could not get the right timezone for some reason, it was off by an hour. I tried to re-sync it from the phone and then adjust it, but I just couldn’t get it to fix itself, so I just had to mentally adjust. I had purposefully not brought my analog watch at the time because I didn’t feel like manually setting it, but it felt a bit dumb to be walking around Japan with my fancy watch that couldn’t tell the time. I’ve had various other bugs as well, usually just small things like apps not opening properly, but every time the watch fails to do something, and you need to pull out your phone it feels like you wasted your money.

The ecosystem is a big part of the smartwatch wars. Apple has mastered the ecosystem and Samsung has put up a good fight, and Google is trying hard to catch up. The advantage to Samsung/Google is that if you buy any other android phone, you can still use your watch. But switching between iOS/Android makes most of these watches bricks outside of the more fitness-oriented ones like the Garmin watches or Fitbits.

No matter what you use, you’ll be using an app of some kind to keep all this health data, and this is where things get a bit interesting. Each of these watches use a different app for tracking all this health data, Apple Health for Apple, Samsung Health for Samsung, and Fitbit for Google (Google acquired Fitbit a while back).

Within the android ecosystem there’s “health connect” an app to provide data interoperability between app like Samsung Health and Fitbit. It was in beta for quite a while, but now you can keep track of your data across various platforms. It does feel a bit like a problem of “too many cooks”, how many apps do you need to keep track of your health anyway?

Importantly, it’s a deterrent to switch out of iOS or Android. if your $800 phone has a $399 companion that can’t be used with your new phone, are you going to switch easily?

I struggle with this one. I don’t think smartwatches are particularly fashionable, most have pretty ugly sports bands and I find it often clashes with my outfits. I have a few nicer leather bands I use for dressy events, but I’ve seen pictures and found the screen to be kinda ugly in those pics. Smartwatches are inherently a bit bulky and thick compared to regular watches. 

But they’re so ubiquitous now, most people seem fine with it, so perhaps it’ll look weird to be smartwatch-less in the future.

Is a smartwatch worth it? I’d say it depends on how much you plan to use the health and fitness features, since that’s really where the experience is best. A smartphone does pretty much everything else better and faster, so the value isn’t quite there for a smartwatch with most apps, tasks, etc. I bought my smartwatch used, so I got a pretty hefty discount on it, so I still think it’s good value for what I paid. I still plan on using it for the gym, but I’ve taken to not using on most days and found that I don’t miss it as much as I thought I would.