Beyond Notifications How Your Smartwatch Can Be a Powerful Tool for Streamlining Your Daily Workflows
Android Police
If youre working out at the gym or on a bike ride, the last thing you want to do is pull out your smartphone to keep painstaking track of your workout progress. Whether its the new Galaxy Watch 6, Pixel Watch, a fantastic Android smartwatch can be a great way to manage your activities at a glance without taking away from the experience. With these smartwatch apps, youll be crushing your goals quickly with better fitness and nutrition.
1 Sleep Cycle: Sleep Tracker
If youre tired, literally, of getting a poor nights sleep, the Sleep Cycle app might be a way to improve your rest. With advanced tracking, including microphone recordings to detect noises in your sleep snoring its a great option for analyzing where your slumber is going wrong. You can select when you start your sleep and even choose the type of alarm youd like to receive in the morning, all from your Android smartwatch. You can select from a more traditional alarm or let Sleep Cycle determine the optimal time to wake you within a wake window.
2 Nike Run Club
As the name would suggest, the Nike Run Club app is a way to add a social element to working out. It allows you to compete in Nike challenges and keep track of your friends workouts to help motivate you further. In addition, there are guided runs and nutrition tips to keep your health goals on track. From your Android smartwatch, you can start and stop runs and monitor your pace and heart rate for an optimal cardio experience.
3 Strava: Run, Bike, Hike
If you want to do more than just run to keep in shape, the Strava app has you covered. It can keep track of hikes and bike rides in addition to all your running activities. You can chart all of the above on maps that you can share with friends and get personalized metrics that keep track of your heart zones and pace. You can initiate workouts and keep track of your speed, heart rate, and distance, all from your smartwatch. If youre looking for a feature-rich fitness experience that makes good use of your watch, the Strava app has much to offer.
4 Fitbod Fitness and Workout Plans
Fitbod takes the workouts a step beyond tracking walks and hikes. If youre looking for a full workout experience, it can help you build better lifting habits and sets with the ability to log reps right from your smartwatch. It will keep track of calories burned and even how much weight you lifted during the entire session. Fitbod can also help ensure each muscle group is worked the proper amount for a balanced workout for best results. If youre serious about your shred, the Fitbod app is a great Android watch companion.
5 FITIV Pulse Heart Rate Monitor
The FITIV Pulse app features a wide range of fitness tracking options with comprehensive Android smartwatch integration. You can keep track of pace, heart rate, calorie burn, and distance from your watch. In addition, the app can keep track of body fat and skeletal muscle mass. Its also helpful to see your workout history and measurements on your watch. Anytime you dont have to open your phone during a workout is good, and the FITIV Pulse app does a good job of limiting the amount of time youll spend on your smartphone.
6 Cycling App - Bike Tracker
Zeopaxas Cycling App does a great job of encouraging progression through video game-style achievements. You can keep track of distance, speed, calories, elevation, and more, all through easily readable progressions. In addition, you can chart your rides over Google Maps with all the benefits of dark mode for nighttime riding. You can start and track rides from your watch while monitoring heart rate and duration from your watch.
7 Calorie Counter - MyNetDiary
Calorie Counter helps keep track of your life away from the gym with plans for healthy eating and weight loss. You log your meals using the Calorie Counter app and can keep track of proteins, carbs, and fats daily from your watch. The companion app allows for barcode scanning to identify foods and nutritional information easily. On your watch, you can track the calories for each individual meal and count your water intake for the day to make sure you stay hydrated. I enjoyed the options available through my TicWatch Pro 5 and recommend the app to anyone trying to adjust their diet.
8 Shapes: Anti-Stress Therapy
As a way to calm down from all that working out, the Shapes app helps reduce stress levels with calming puzzles accompanied by music. Its a great experience on a smartwatch with soothing colors that help take your mind off the daily grind. If you notice your heart rate getting a little high, open up the Shapes app and feel the noise of the day melt away in the background. The puzzles can get a little repetitive, but if you find the app useful, there are ways to purchase more sets.
Improve your smartwatch experience with these awesome apps
I love the flexibility smartwatches provide, and these apps show how powerful tracking information can be on your wrist. Whether it's building the proper workout or making sure you're getting enough water, smartwatches are a fantastic tool for building a healthier lifestyle. If you start using these apps, you'll notice a difference in your life.
What Is a Smartwatch and What Do They Do?
A smartwatch is a portable device that's designed to be worn on a wrist. Like smartphones, they use touchscreens, offer apps, and often record your heart rate and other vital signs.
The Apple Watch andWear (formerly Android Wear) models prompted more consumers to appreciate the usefulness of wearing a mini computer on their wrists. In addition, specialty smartwatches for outdoor activities often supplement other, bulkier devices in an adventurer's tool kit.
What Is a Smartwatch and What Do They Do?
A Short History of the Smartwatch
While digital watches have been around for decadessome with abilities like calculators and unit convertersonly in the 2010s did tech companies begin releasing watches withsmartphone-like abilities.
Apple, Samsung, Sony, and other major players offer smartwatches on the consumer market, but a small startup actually deserves credit for popularizing the modern-day smartwatch. When Pebble announced its first smartwatch in 2013, it raised a record amount of funding on Kickstarter and went on to sell more than one million units.
The Pebble smartwatch was discontinued when the company shut down in 2016, but still has a number of fans and enthusiasts who continue to use and develop for it.
At the same time, advances in silicon miniaturization opened the door to other kinds of dedicated-purpose smartwatches. Companies like Garmin, for example, support smartwatches like the Fenix, which are more rugged and optimized with sensors and trackers to support back-country expeditions. Likewise, companies like Suunto released smartwatches optimized for scuba diving that withstand extended time at significant depths.
What Do Smartwatches Do?
Most smartwatcheswhether they're intended for daily use (as with the Apple Watch) or for specific purposes (as with the Garmin Fenix)offer a suite of standard features:
- Notifications: Smartphones display notifications to alert you of important events or activities. The types of notifications differ; devices connected to a smartphone may simply mirror the phone's notifications on your wrist, but other smartwatches display notifications that only a wearable could provide. For example, newer Apple Watches includes a fall sensor. If you fall while wearing the watch, it senses your subsequent movement. If it doesn't detect any movement, it sends a series of escalating notifications. Fail to respond to the notification, and the watch assumes you're injured and alerts authorities on your behalf.
- Apps: Beyond displaying notifications from your phone, a smartwatch is only as good as the apps it supports. App ecosystems vary, and they're tied to either Apple's or Google's environments. Smartwatches with a dedicated purpose, such as hiking or diving, generally support the apps they need to accomplish that purpose without the opportunity to add other kinds of apps.
- Media management: Most smartwatches paired with smartphones can manage media playback for you. For example, when you're listening to music on an iPhone using Apple's AirPods, you can use your Apple Watch to change volume and tracks.
- Answer messages by voice: Remember the old Dick Tracy comics, where the hero detective used a watch as a phone? Modern smartwatches running either the watchOS or Wear operating systems support voice dictation.
- Fitness tracking: If youre a hard-core athlete, a dedicated fitness band is likely a better choice than a smartwatch. Still, many smartwatches include a heart rate monitor and a pedometer to help track your workouts.
- GPS: Most smartwatches include a GPS for tracking your location or receiving location-specific alerts.
- Good battery life: Modern smartwatches feature batteries that get you through the day, with normal use, with a bit of juice still left to go. Battery use varies; the Apple Watch typically gets 18 hours of normal use on a single charge, while the Pebble gets two or three days.
Types of Smartwatches
Broadly speaking, smartwatches occupy two niches in the wearables market. First, a general-purpose smartwatchlike the Apple Watch and most Google-powered Wear devicesblend form and function. They're designed to replace mechanical wristwatches and are heavily smartphone-dependent. Think of them as a support device for your phone that you happen to keep on your wrist.
You also see vendor-specific classes of general-purpose smartwatches in the consumer market:
- Apple Watch: Designed and sold by Apple.
- Pixel Watch: Designed and sold by Google, compatible with Android phones but not currently with Apple devices.
- Wear watches: Designed and sold by many vendors, using Google's Wear operating system.
- Tizen watches: Proprietary operating system designed by Samsung for its popular Galaxy line of smartwatches.
The other niche includes specialty devices intended for specific-use cases. These devices often offer a more robust version of a fitness tracker, insofar as they bleed between a phone-dependent smartwatch and a stand-alone fitness tracker like a Fitbit.
Examples of these specialized devices include:
- Hiking watches: Intended for remote travel and featuring solid battery life, GPS tracking and navigation, basic vitals, and weather forecasting. Often engineered for advanced durability to protect against bumps, drops, dust, and water. Examples include the Garmin Fenix 5 Plus, the Suunto 9 Baro, and the 2022 Apple Watch Ultra.
- Diving watches: Connect your first-stage regulator to a Bluetooth transmitter to use a diving watch. Garmin's Descent Mk2i and Suunto's DX offer depth, time-remaining, temperature, and other important indicators. And the Apple Watch Ultra can make use of the Oceanic+ Dive Computer App to calculate dive times, display a number of different stats, and can handle depths of up to 130 feet (40 meters).
- Flying watches: A niche market, but Garmin's MARQ Aviator Gen. 2 offers a jet-lag advisor, GPS-powered moving map, NEXRAD weather reports (using METARs, TAFs and MOS2), flight logging, a barometric altimeter, and more.
Smartwatch Market Growth
Smartwatches settled into a steep growth curve in the late 2010s in terms of global market adoption. Data from Statista shows that sales rose from five million units worldwide in 2014 to an estimated 173 million in 2022. Apple's market share rose from 13- to 30-percent from the second fiscal quarter of 2017 to the same period in 2021. With Samsung in the second-place spot with a 10-percent market share.
During the same period, specialty vendors like Garmin saw a 4.1-percent increase in year-over-year growth, while fitness-tracker-only vendors like Fitbit saw a nearly 22-percent market plunge.
Statista predicts that over 253 million smartwatches will ship worldwide by 2025.
FAQ
What are hybrid smartwatches?
Hybrid smartwatches are watches with the traditional looks and feels of a watch, but they also come with smartwatch functionality.
What is the difference between a smartwatch and a Fitbit?
Fitbits are fitness trackers, which do have functionality similar to smartwatches, but they focus on fitness-oriented features and don't often come with the advanced features of smartwatches.
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