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Readers' Choice Awards 2017: Smartwatches and Fitness Trackers

The wearables market has exploded, but which brands are your real favorites? Take a look.

Updated November 15, 2017
Readers' Choice Awards 2017: Smartwatches and Fitness Trackers

In this month's PCMag Readers' Choice Award survey, we look at wearable devices—specifically smartwatches and fitness trackers. In the last quarter, Apple alone sold 3.9 million wearables, followed closesly by Xiaomi (3.6 million), and Fitbit (3.5 million), according to Canalys. Of course, like many PCMag readers, I embraced wearables early, driven by a very real need.

About eight years ago, I was out having a very nice lunch with a friend. To be polite, I kept my smartphone in my pocket, but I had it set to vibrate in case someone was looking for me. Throughout the meal, I never felt the phone vibrate. However, when I checked the phone as I was leaving, I found several missed calls from my wife as well as a texted picture of her car, smashed up, with the note, "If you want to know why the car looks like this, call me." I felt awful and phoned my wife right away. Apparently, a driver had ignored a stop sign and plowed straight into her car. Fortunately, my wife wasn't hurt, but we couldn't say the same for the vehicle.

I said to myself that there had to be a wearable device that would let me know when I was getting a call or a text message. This was before big companies like Apple and Samsung offered smartwatches. I finally came upon a basic analog watch from ThinkGeek with a tiny Bluetooth-connected digital display and a vibration motor. It was nothing fancy, but it did exactly what I needed. Unfortunately, the watch portion broke after only five months, and I was back in the dark.

Several years later, a small Canadian company, Pebble Technology, announced the Pebble smartwatch on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. The company was looking for $100,000 to get the product off the ground, but raised over $10,000,000 from nearly 70,000 backers within a month. Clearly, I wasn't the only one with this pent-up need. The first Pebble Smartwatch was one PCMag's first Editors' Choice winners for wearables. Sadly, Pebble couldn't compete once the big boys entered the market and last year was purchased for its technology by Fitbit.

Pebble 2 + Heart Rate

Companies like Fitbit, Garmin, Jawbone, and many others were very busy over the past several years creating small, lightweight, and fairly inexpensive devices to help people track their steps, heart rate, sleep, and more. The data gathered by these devices helped wearers set goals and participate in fitness competitions online.

In recent years, the line between smartwatches and fitness trackers has blurred almost completely. Perhaps more accurately, smartwatches are subsuming the fitness tracker market. The Apple Watch, Samsung Gear, and others provide the same measurements as a dedicated fitness tracker. In response, Fitbit, Garmin, and others have added smartwatch functionality to the higher-end portion of their product lines.

We asked our survey respondents how they use their wearable device; 94 percent of respondents track health and fitness—it's the most popular use. Of course, most devices—even your smartphone—do this automatically. Even if you're a couch potato, you're being tracked. (For some reason, it seems that my smartwatch always compliments me on hitting my movement goal when I'm on the way to the kitchen to get a snack.)

The next most common use is as a watch (76 percent), followed by receiving text message notifications (59 percent), and phone call notifications (55 percent). However, the industry percentages are dragged down by specific brands. For instance, only 66 percent of Pebble users (there are plenty of them still out there) track health and fitness and only about a third of Fitbit users get text and phone notifications.

Readers Choice 17 - Wearables - Top Uses

To date, aside from their fitness-tracking capabilities, smartwatches have primarily served as remote screens for smartphones, displaying smartphone notifications, controlling smartphone music, and so forth. Now we are beginning to see smartwatches (such as certain versions of the latest Apple Watch and the Samsung Gear S3) with built-in cellular support, so they can operate untethered, letting you leave the phone behind and still make calls, send texts, view maps, and stream music. Although these represent the high end of the smartwatch market, they may foretell an eventual switch to the smartwatch as the center of your personal communication and entertainment world.

If you're considering your first smartwatch or fitness tracker or thinking about upgrading, read on. See how our survey respondents rated their satisfaction with the devices they use on several criteria to help you make the right choice.

The PCMag Readers' Choice survey for Smartwatches and Fitness Trackers was in the field from October 16, 2017 through November 6, 2017. For more information on how the survey is conducted, read the survey methodology. Each person who completed the survey was entered into a drawing to win an Amazon.com gift card valued at $350.

You can win! Sign up for the Readers' Choice Survey mailing list to receive invitations for future sweepstakes.

Looking for expert opinion? Read The Best Smartwatches and The Best Fitness Trackers.

Wearable Survey Results

Apple has a way of bringing legitimacy to a market. It wasn't the first out of the gate with a digital music player, for example, but iPods soon dominated sales. It also wasn't the first in smartphones; BlackBerry had smartphones for years before the iPhone arrived. And it certainly wasn't the first to market with a smartwatch or fitness tracker. But when the Apple Watch showed up in 2015, it had a polished, thoughtful design not often found in first-generation products. Now on its third generation, Apple is delivering the highest satisfaction ratings on nearly every measure and it wins our first Readers' Choice Award in the wearables category.

Readers Choice 17 - Wearables - Overall

Five companies received the requisite minimum 50 responses from readers to be included in our survey analysis. Apple earned top marks on most measures, including overall satisfaction (8.8 on a scale from 0 for extremely dissatisfied to 10 for extremely satisfied), satisfaction with reliability (9.1) and ease of setup (9.0) among other ratings. In addition, it received a 9.2 for likelihood to recommend, a very important measure of customer satisfaction; it also is the question used to generate the Net Promoter Score of 73 percent, the highest of all the vendors.

Apple Watch's highest rating was 9.6 for satisfaction with traditional watch functions, but it also received high marks for satisfaction with receiving phone notifications (9.0), satisfaction with receiving text message notifications (9.2) and satisfaction with setting timers (9.4), a relatively mundane but extremely useful function of these devices.

Dedicated fitness trackers primarily compete with smartwatches on price; they do and cost less. When it comes to satisfaction, however, they don't rate any better. Apple's rating of 8.8 for satisfaction with tracking health and fitness beat Fitbit and Garmin, which both received ratings of 8.6 for tracking. Samsung, which primarily makes smartwatches but also offers plain ol' fitness trackers, was right behind at 8.5.

Apple Watch Series 3 vs. fitbit ionic

Interestingly, the second highest rated product in overall satisfaction was the now-defunct Pebble brand. Respondents gave Pebble an 8.5 for overall satisfaction, beating Samsung (8.4), Garmin (8.2), and Fitbit (7.8). Pebble owners were realistic about the future of the brand—it only rated 6.1 for likelihood to recommend—but it's clear respondents liked their Pebble smartwatches. The company delivered simple, inexpensive customizable devices that let you know when you received a phone call or text message. Pebble received a 9.6 for satisfaction with traditional watch functions, tied with Apple. Its rating of 9.1 for satisfaction with phone call notifications was best in our survey and its rating of 9.1 for satisfaction with text message notifications was just behind Apple's 9.2. Both Apple and Pebble received ratings of 8.3 for satisfaction with customization through apps, the highest mark on that measure.

Pebble smartwatches work with Apple iPhones and Android smartphones, as do the Samsung, Garmin, and Fitbit devices. (Some functionality is limited on certain platforms.) The Apple Watch, on the other hand, only works with iPhones—even the latest version with built-in LTE won't pair with Android devices.

If you're an Android user, consider Samsung first. Among brands that work with Android, Samsung wearables had the highest overall satisfaction (8.4), satisfaction with reliability (8.7, tied with Garmin), satisfaction with ease of setup (8.7, tied with Fitbit), and likelihood to recommend (8.6). Samsung beat Apple by a substantial margin in satisfaction with talking on the phone via the watch; an 8.8 compared to Apple's 8.0. Using a watch as a speakerphone may seem a little too Dick Tracy at first, but it's actually a very useful feature when your hands are occupied.

Apple Watch Series 3 LTE 8

Garmin has a definite focus on fitness, but it competed well with the other smartwatch-oriented companies. Its ratings of 9.1 for satisfaction with traditional watch functions, 8.7 for satisfaction with phone call notifications, and 8.5 for satisfaction with text notifications are all very good, if not quite up to Apple, Pebble, and Samsung's ratings. The main knock against Garmin was in satisfaction with customizing the device through apps, where it only received a 6.9. Garmin does have several apps in its Connect IQ store, but it can't match the breadth of apps that Apple, Samsung, and Android Wear watches offer.

Fitbit received an even lower rating in satisfaction with customizability (6.4) and in most other categories it had the lowest satisfaction ratings. In addition, Fitbit had the highest percentage of respondents reporting needing repairs (21 percent). Every other company was below 10 percent.

Related Story See all of our survey results for wearables.


WINNERS: WEARABLES

Readers Choice 2010 AwardReaders' Choice 2010 AwardApple
Apple is setting the standard for satisfaction in the smartwatch market, receiving the highest ratings in nearly every category, including satisfaction for tracking health and activity, besting brands that primarily focus on fitness.

Apple Watch Series 3 Review
PCMag Logo Apple Watch Series 3 Review

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