Smartwatch Shootout: The battle for your wrist
PUBLISHED ONFebruary 16, 2015 9:12 AMByJames Lu
The wearable device market is quickly becoming the most hotly contested space in technology. And for almost every company invested in the area, the most lucrative piece of real estate is your wrist. But with so many choices out there, which smartwatch is the best?
We've chosen four of the most popular smartwatches released last year, and we'll be evaluating them based on design, style, display and battery life. Interestingly, most of them are based on the Android Wear platform, which is fast gaining momentum just like Android did for smartphones.
Before we start, here's a look at the four models we'll be comparing:
ASUS ZenWatch
The ASUS ZenWatch is the only smartwatch in our shootout sporting a square shape face. That's not to say that it's boring though. The ZenWatch's chassis is made from two layers of stainless steel sandwiching a classy rose gold steel midsection. While the ZenWatch's display may be square, the frame around the display is rounded, softening the watch's overall appearance. The soft curves and subtle gold colour makes the ZenWatch the most unisex and classy of the smartwatches in our shootout, with the other watches definitely more suited for men. Unfortunately, the bezel surrounding the screen is quick thick, and detracts from the overall sleekness of the watch.
The ZenWatch comes fitted with a soft tan-coloured stitched genuine leather strap, with a metal deployant clasp, but you can easily swap it for any standard 22mm watchstrap if the colour or style isn't to your liking.
Unlike the prominent buttons on our other smartwatches, the ZenWatch's settings button is hidden on the underside of the watch. While this gives the watch a nice symmetrical appearance, it's clear that ASUS didn't design the button to be used often as it's actually quite tricky to press with the watch worn on your wrist. As such, the main points of interaction with the ZenWatch are its touchscreen and through voice commands.
The ZenWatch has a 1.63-inch, 320 x 320 pixel AMOLED display (278 ppi). On paper, the ZenWatch's 278 ppi should give it about the same clarity as the Motorola Moto 360, and it should be only slightly worse than the Samsung Gear S and LG G Watch R. The reality however is quite different, as it's noticeably the worst of the lot. The display has a hazy quality, which is exasperated by the glass on top of the screen being extra thick too.
Like LG's G Watch R, the ZenWatch is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor and runs on Android Wear. ASUS has also included a few of its own apps, including some exclusive watch faces, and a nice compass app. There's also a useful camera remote app that lets you use the watch as a viewfinder for your ASUS phone's camera. As with most smartwatches today, the ZenWatch includes a heart rate monitor and accelerometer for activity tracking. There's also an exclusive ASUS health and fitness app.
The ZenWatch has a unique way to measure your pulse. Instead of using an optical light sensor like most other wearables, you place two fingers on each side of the metal frame at the same time, completing an electrical circuit. Unfortunately, this isn't any faster than the other method, and seems to be less accurate too, with erratic readings often over 100 bpm despite the fact that we hadn't done anything for the past five minutes. Having said that, the review unit we're testing is a pre-production model, so it may not be as accurate as final production models.
Battery life on the ZenWatch was decent but not amazing. We were able to get about 18 hours out of it but not much more. It definitely requires charging every night via a clip-on charging cradle and micro-USB charger.
Motorola Moto 360
The Moto 360 was the first round face smartwatch. It sports a sleek minimalist design complemented by a premium build of glass and stainless steel, with a leather strap made from high-end Horween Chicago leather. Having said that, while the Moto 360 is undeniably stylish, it does feel a little bulky on its thin strap, both in terms of width and overall height, and the net result makes it look more like a disc on a strap than a watch. Our review unit (and the model that will be available in Singapore) is silver with a grey strap. A black version with a black strap is also available through Motorola's online store.
The watch boasts a large 1.56-inch-diameter 320 x 290 pixel resolution display (277ppi) with fairly decent viewing angles and good brightness. Compared to the other round watch in our shootout, the LG G Watch R, the Moto 360's round screen is around 39 per cent bigger, with much thinner bezels, which seems like it would be the better circular display, except for the fact that the Moto 360's display isn't actually a circle.
In Motorola's quest for a round screen with the thinnest outer bezel possible, it ended up adding a little black bar at the bottom of the screen that cuts the circle off. That black bar houses an ambient light sensor for auto-adjusting screen brightness. It's not a total deal-killer, but for a watch with a beautiful, clean look everywhere else, this perfection-ruining flaw certainly stands out. As a result of the bar, white watchfaces all end up looking like they have a little slice cut out of them, or even worse, a whole section of dead pixels.
Like the G Watch R, on the side of the Moto 360, there's a little home button that looks like a watch crown that can be used to activate the watch or quickly bring up the settings menu. On the back of the watch, you'll find an optical green LED heart-rate monitor and inside, the 360 also has a pedometer for activity tracking. We found both the heart rate monitor and step counter to be reasonably accurate, with fairly consistent results overall.
Like the G Watch R and ZenWatch, the Moto 360 runs on Android Wear, but unlike the Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processors found in LG and ASUS' watches, the Moto 360 uses a considerably less powerful Texas Instruments OMAP 3 processor. As a result, transitions and animations are just a little bit slower on the Moto 360.
When the Moto 360 was first released, it was plagued with bad battery life. A recent firmware update has improved things but you'll still only get about 16 hours of life on a single charge out of it, which was the worst in our shootout. The Moto 360 uses a simple inductive charging cradle to recharge, no magnets or connectors required. As a nice touch, the screen will auto flip to the side when the watch is in its cradle. While it's a neat and simple design, it also has its drawbacks. You need a flat surface to set the charger down on, so if you try to recharge the 360 in your bag or on in an airline seat pocket you'll find that it won't stay in place.
LG G Watch R
Like the Motorola Moto 360, the LG G Watch R is a round-face smartwatch, but with its bezel markings and recessed glass, it looks a lot more like an actual watch, instead of a disc on a strap. The watch's chassis is made from stainless steel in a matte black finish and it comes with a genuine black leather strap. The strap is a bit stiff, and isn't as nice as the leather used on the Moto 360 or ZenWatch, but it can be easily switched out for any standard 22mm watch strap.
It's worth noting that while the bezel around the G Watch R's face looks like a diving bezel and has the relevant 5-minute markings, it doesn't rotate and is merely for show. Like the Moto 360, the watch has a non-rotating watch crown on the side that works as a home button.
The overall look of the G Watch R with its chunky, angular build and black finish is definitely the most masculine of our watches, especially when compared with the ASUS ZenWatch, which is much softer and more unisex.
The screen on the G Watch R is recessed into the body of the watch, as opposed to the Moto 360's display, which actually sits slightly above the surrounding bezel. Android Wear requires a lot of edge to edge swiping, so you might find that the protruding bezel gets in the way, but personally, we quite liked the noticeable stopping point.
The display itself is a 1.3-inch P-OLED screen with a 320 x 320 pixel resolution (348ppi). The screen is the smallest out of all of our watches, but it's big enough to read messages and see the time clearly. The display is also bright and sharp, with good viewing angles, and it probably has the best colour reproduction of all of our smart watches as well. Crucially, unlike the Moto 360, the display is also a perfect circle, although the tradeoff is a lack of an ambient light sensor so you'll have to manually adjust display brightness.
The back of the watch is plastic, and houses the heart rate sensor and magnetic charging connector. As with our other watches the G Watch R also has an accelerometer for activity tracking. In our testing we found both the heart rate monitor and pedometer functions to be reasonably accurate and consistent.
Like the ZenWatch, the G Watch R is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor and runs on Android Wear. LG has also capitalised on the G Watch R's round display with a number of exclusive Android Wear watch faces, many of which mimic the look of high-end luxury watchfaces. You can see more of the watch, interface and watchfaces in our earlier hands-on article.
The G Watch R was the best performer for our smartwatches when it came to battery life thanks to its huge 410mAh battery capacity. We were able to get about 24 hours of battery life, even with the screen brightness set to the highest level. You'll still need to charge it every night via the magnetic clip on cradle, but you can probably stretch battery life to two days if you're unable to get to a power socket in time.
Samsung Gear S
The Samsung Gear S is the only smartwatch in our shootout not powered by Android Wear. Instead, it uses Tizen, an open source OS that, like Android, is based on Linux. With its huge display, metallic bezels and home button beneath the screen, the Gear S looks a lot more like a tiny curved smartphone strapped to your wrist than a traditional watch.
While other smartwatch manufacturers have veered towards more fashionable designs, Samsung seems to be fully embracing the computer on your wrist style, and the Gear S's thick housing, chunky metal clasp and rubber strap is definitely more geek than chic. While its curved form factor makes the Gear S quite comfortable to wear, it's also ridiculously large, and it's probably going to be too big for most women's wrists.
Where the Gear S tries to win you over is with its unique capabilities. It's the only smartwatch in our shootout with its own micro-SIM card slot and 3G modem inside. That means you can use it without pairing it with a smartphone, and it also lets you make and receive calls on it, thanks to its built-in speakers and microphone (alternatively you can use a Bluetooth headset). You can even respond to emails using a tiny onscreen QWERTY keyboard, although, honestly, trying to type on a 2-inch screen with one finger is just absurd. You're much better off with voice recognition, but Samsung's Tizen-based voice input isn't quite as good as Android Wear. It works, but it often takes a few attempts to get it right. While we enjoyed the novelty of making phone calls with the Gear S, ultimately, you're still better just getting out your smartphone. You can see more of the watch's interface in our earlier hands-on article here.
The Gear S has a curved 2-inch AMOLED display with a 480 x 360 pixel resolution (300 ppi), making it the largest smartwatch display currently available. As is normally the case with Samsung's displays, the Gear S's display is super vibrant and colorful with great viewing angles. One quirk worth noting is that some of Samsung's older Gear apps aren't optimized for the Gear S's display size, and end up looking a bit stretched out and distorted. The Gear S's huge display does have some benefits though. Thanks to its great contrast and large size, it's one of the best smartwatches for reading content and the big curved screen makes vertical scrolling easy too.
With the Gear S running on Tizen OS, you won't be able to use any Android Wear apps with it; instead, it has its own Gear App marketplace. There's less choice here than with Android Wear, but there are a few winners to take note of, such as the Nike+ running app (which is still in development for Android Wear).
Despite having the smallest battery size, battery life on the Gear S was surprisingly decent, especially considering its 3G modem and large display. We were able to get about 20 hours out of it on one charge. When you do need to recharge the Gear S, you'll need to use a clip on charging cradle.
Conclusion
The Samsung Gear S stands out as the black sheep of our shootout. We applaud Samsung for putting so much into the device, and its feature set is unbeatable. Having said that, all that extra functionality makes the Gear S much more expensive, and after we got over the initial novelty of making calls on the watch, Dick Tracy style, we ended up just using its basic smartwatch functions, such as the pedometer, notifications, and obviously checking the time - all things that can be done with any Android Wear smartwatch. It's also worth remembering that the Gear S is only compatible with Samsung smartphones, and while it can technically be used without pairing with a smartphone, you really need to pair it to get the most out of it.
As for our three Android Wear smartwatches, essentially, they all offer the same functionality. As such, the most important factor when choosing an Android Wear smartwatch is probably going to be how it looks. After all, if you're going to walk around with this thing strapped to your wrist all day, you want it to look good, right? And unlike smartphones, which are basically all rectangular slabs with screens on them, smartwatches have a lot more room to play with different form factors, styles and even display shapes. With that in mind, the two watches that stood out to us were the Motorola Moto 360 and LG G Watch R. While there's nothing wrong with traditional square-face watches (in fact, we quite like them), but square smartwatches like the ZenWatch just look too much like tiny computers strapped to your wrist.
Between the Moto 360 and G Watch R, while we liked the sleek, minimalist style of the Moto 360, the black bar that cuts off the bottom section of the screen ruins its otherwise elegant design. Add to that its poor battery life and often laggy transitions and its a deal breaker for us. On the other hand, while the G Watch R's chunky, angular black aesthetic looks more aggressive and masculine, it also looks a lot more like a watch, especially with its faux diving bezel. Its excellent battery life, gorgeous crisp display, ability to take any standard 22mm watch strap and snappy processor sealed the deal for us.
Last but not least, you might be wondering why we've not reviewed Sony's smartwatch offering, but it's only because Sony wasn't able to send us a unit for evaluation despite giving them extra grace. We'll review their offerings separately when we get them next. So for now, here's how the smartwatches stack up:-
 LG G Watch R |   |
 Motorola Moto 360 | |
 Samsung Gear S | |
 ASUS ZenWatch |  |
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