Thinking of buying a smartwatch? Read this first

Are you thinking of buying a smartwatch for the holidays?

here are dozens to choose from -- but most of them have identical features, and differ mainly in quality of materials, design, and cost.

Before you decide which one to buy, figure out what you want most out of a smartwatch first, then focus on style and price. 

Over the past few months, I tested seven smartwatches back-to-back, for about two weeks each.

Here's where each excelled: 

If you want something straightforward

The Motorola 360, Pebble Classic, and Vector Luna are easy to use.

 The Moto 360 ($300), Pebble Classic ($100), Pebble Time Steel ($250) and Vector Luna ($399) were easiest to use.

Setup was a breeze, and I could keep track of the weather and Twitter (TWTR, Tech30) -- the two things I check the most -- in two steps. 

Software for the Moto 360 was the best out of the four. Battery life was best on the Pebble Classic and Vector Luna mainly because of their e-paper and e-ink displays.

If you care most about fitness

The Apple Watch, Samsung Gear S2, and Withings Activité and Activité Pop all have fitness in mind.

Both the Apple Watch ($350) and Samsung Gear S2 ($300) have applications that can track specific types of exercise, such as biking and elliptical machine workouts.

The Withings Activité ($450), Activité Pop ($150), and Pebble Classic may be a great choice too for swimmers because they're water resistant up to 50 meters. 

If you want your smartwatch to act like your smartphone

 

The Apple Watch and Samsung Gear S2 can do a lot.

Get an Apple Watch or Samsung Gear S2.

The Apple Watch can do pretty much anything an iPhone can do -- as long as the phone is within Bluetooth or Wi-Fi range. After you figure out the controls, the Apple Watch easily becomes another familiar device that will help you feel less anxious when you can't reach your phone every two seconds. 

The Samsung Gear S2 is fun and easy to use thanks to its rotating bezel. The touchscreen is responsive and bright. Samsung also sells a version of this watch with cellular connectivity, but I didn't get a chance to test that one. Currently, the watch only works with Android devices.

If you care most about battery life  

The Vector Luna and Withings Activité both have very long battery lives so you don't have to worry about charging your smartwatch every day.

 
The Withings Activité battery lasts eight months. The Vector Luna can run 30 days without charging.

The Activité uses a standard CR2025 watch battery you can replace yourself, but the company "strongly" recommends professional care because the smartwatch is water resistant. 

The Vector Luna had the longest rechargeable battery life out of all the smartwatches I tried.

The Activité watches only show the time, alarm, and a daily activity progress. 

Some important caveats


-- While most of the devices helped me stay on top of notifications when my phone was out of reach, having to keep them charged, tethered, and close to my phone nearly outweighed the benefits of wearing them.

-- Sometimes, fidgeting with my smartwatch felt like extra work and an extra step to using my phone. 

-- Smartwatches were most useful when I was doing housework, driving, walking around the city or office, and socializing. They were all waterproof to some extent and sturdy enough that I didn't have to worry about being delicate.

-- The Samsung Gear S2 and Pebble Classic were my favorite smartwatches to wear. They were fun and easy to use, had good battery life, and performed enough of the functions I needed at a reasonable price. 

Overall, smartwatches are perfect for people who like to wear watches and want to be attached to a few of their favorite mobile apps constantly.

If you don't fit this description, you might be better off waiting until more smartwatches can work independently of a phone and have better battery life. 

 Source - CNN

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The Nexus 6P has a brilliant, all-metal design, a big and beautiful display, great camera, impressive all-around battery life ... name something you'd want in a high-end smartphone, and chances are the Nexus 6P ticks that box.

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Flip it around you'll see one of the best displays you can find on any 2015 smartphone. The 5.7-inch, Quad HD AMOLED screen is made by Samsung and, with the same specs, could very well be the same panel found in the Galaxy Note 5 (that's a good thing). Even its mid-ranged brightness settings are very bright, white balance is terrific (it leans slightly towards yellows compared to the iPhone 6s, but still in very good shape) and that 518 PPI pixel density has content looking razor-sharp.

 

You need to split the Nexus 6P's battery life into two categories. Its active-use battery life is good: in our Wi-Fi video streaming benchmark it dropped 14 percent per hour. Tested at equal brightness (measured by a lux meter), that's just a hair behind the Note 5, Galaxy S6 edge+ and latest iPhones (13 percent per hour) and better than the Galaxy S6 (16 percent per hour).

The Nexus 6P's standby battery life, though, pushes it ahead of those phones. Android 6.0 Marshmallow has a new setting called Doze that cuts down on battery drain when you aren't using your device. When it's resting in my pocket, the Nexus 6P only drops (usually) 1 percent or (sometimes) 2 percent per hour. And that's with notifications coming in regularly and a smartwatch connected via Bluetooth.

Good active-use plus great inactive-use uptimes equals very good all-around battery life for the Nexus 6P.

When you do need to charge, the phone makes fumbling around trying to find the "right" way to insert a microUSB cable a thing of the past, as it joins the Nexus 5X and OnePlus 2 in using the new reversible USB Type C standard. And unlike the mid-ranged 5X, the 6P includes a short USB Type C to Type A cable in the box, to help smooth out the transition to the new standard.

The Nexus 6P's camera is among the best of the year. We took identical shots with it and the iPhone 6s, and the only area where the 6s won out was in extremely poorly-lit shots. The Nexus' shot didn't look any darker than the iPhone's (both captured plenty of light considering the horrible lighting), but it added some noticeable noise that we didn't see in the iPhone's shot.

Everywhere else, though, we'd pick the Nexus. Its flash shots look slightly better (less blown-out, more evenly lit with richer colors) and its medium-lit to well-lit indoor and outdoor samples captured more detail. As long as you're okay sticking with the flash in poorly-lit settings, then we'd pick it over the iPhone.

Here are a few samples (these are downscaled to low resolution for the web, but you can click them for higher-res versions).

First, outdoors under direct sunlight:

 

Indoors, under medium lighting:

... and extremely poor lighting, no flash:

The Nexus has a camera quick-launch shortcut, where you double-tap the power button to jump straight to the camera (similar to what Samsung did with this year's flagships). It works as advertised, letting us jump from sleeping phone to captured shot in under 3 seconds.

The camera app did, however, occasionally freeze up on us for a few precious seconds when launching, keeping those impressive launch speeds from being quite as consistent as we'd like.

If you're looking for a new large-ish smartphone, we recommend taking a long and hard look at the Nexus 6P. You won't be able to do that in stores, as it's an online exclusive (from the Google Store and Huawei in the US), but if you take the chance and order blindly, we think you're unlikely to be disappointed.

Not only is the Nexus 6P a top Smartphone of the Year candidate, it's easily the best value of a 2015 flagship. When buying at full retail, its biggest rivals – the iPhone 6s Plus, Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 edge+ – each cost $200-300 extra. The Nexus 6P is the best $499 smartphone we've seen.


The oustanding Nexus 6P is available now, from the Google Store and Huawei's US store, starting at $499 for 32 GB storage.


Source :gizmag

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