Of the scores of Wear OS by Google (also called Wear OS, and formerly Android Wear) smartwatches that function nearly the same, the Fossil Q Explorist and Fossil Q Venture are the ones we recommend for most people. Similar models that differ mainly in size and design, these two Fossil watches offer style and band options for the widest range of tastes while performing as well as (or better than) anything else out there. They handle notifications and your responses without delay, provide all-day battery life, swiftly handle voice transcription and Google Assistant questions and provide casual fitness tracking. Their buttons and screens are responsive. They look and feel like good watches, too, which is something we think most people want from a smartwatch at this point.

Out of a vast field of similar watches, we picked the Q Explorist and Q Venture because of their middle-of-the-road prices, availability and variety of styles. These two models are flagships for the Fossil Group’s collection of 14 style brands producing more than 300 planned smartwatches. This means that if you find a smartwatch from Diesel, Skagen, Tag Heuer, Kate Spade, Movado or another Fossil-connected brand that fits your style better, you should feel free to buy it, because it will have roughly the same internal hardware as our picks.

Samsung’s Gear Sport is not as stylish as Fossil’s Q watches, and because it runs Samsung’s Tizen operating system instead of Wear OS, it has nowhere near the app support of Wear OS. But as a smartwatch that shows your phone notifications and lets you respond to them, lasts all day and tracks your recreational workouts, it is a great device. It’s not meant for competitive speed training, but it has built-in GPS and heart-rate sensing and a rotating bezel that’s much easier to use while exercising than a touchscreen. It does suffer from weak voice transcription and a barely-there S Voice assistant, but it fits a lot of core smartwatch functions into a relatively smart-looking package that’s better for fitness-minded wearers than our top picks.

Do you need a smartwatch?

Almost nobody needs a smartwatch. Deciding if the cost – and hassle of charging yet another device – is worth it to you depends on what you need.

For most people, the most useful thing a smartwatch can do is relay phone notifications to your wrist so you can check them without having to pull out and wake up your handset. You can still be distracted by whatever is buzzing you, but it’s easier to quickly see whether something is important or not. Often you can interact with that notification – by acknowledging it, dismissing it, or replying to a message with voice dictation, a pre-written response or (awkward) finger typing or swiping – right on the watch.

The style offerings for smartwatches have improved dramatically, and your options are no longer limited to “large, nerdy and round” or “large, nerdy and square”. Still, even with more than 300 Fossil-branded watches planned across 14 major watch and fashion brands, smartwatches are generally much wider and chunkier than standard watches, as the size needed to accommodate the electronics and battery lends itself to bolder, more pronounced styles.

Most smartwatches have a fitness component for the very good reason that a watch is moving with you throughout the day. For counting steps, encouraging activity and tracking occasional long walks, runs or bike rides, most smartwatches will do fine. If you want a device to track your everyday runs or cycling sessions, you want a GPS running watch. If you’re serious about tracking and improving your movement and sleep, a fitness tracker will do that for less money and look more discrete doing so. There are smartwatches that lean heavily toward sports and fitness in their marketing, but there are drawbacks to each of them not found in a dedicated device. At the other extreme, if all you really need is step-counting, a hybrid smartwatch – with an analogue face like a traditional watch, but with built-in motion sensors and months-long battery life – may be a better option.

Some smartwatches have robust offerings of apps, either pre-installed on the watch or available for download in an app store. Apps can be as simple as a timer or stopwatch, or can control your smart-home devices, switch up your music or provide turn-by-turn directions for walking or driving. In our testing and everyday use, however, these watch apps rarely offer a great experience. But there are some exceptions, including some fitness apps and apps that track things like water or food intake.

I’ve worn a smartwatch almost daily for nearly five years as of this writing. I often feel that it keeps me alert to what’s happening, especially for things like texts from my wife and close friends, alarms that a parking meter is nearly expired, or reminders that dinner needs to start marinating or roasting. It has also encouraged me to get moving and take a walk when I’d otherwise stay in place. Sometimes it has made me feel rude, distracted or overly attached to whatever little blip comes next. It has come in handy on my bike, and it has distracted me when I’m driving my car. Some of this can be better handled through settings and filters, but some of it comes from human nature.

For people in the Apple ecosystem, the Apple Watch is the clear best option.

How we picked and tested

Since the early days of modern smartwatches, we’ve sought to test as many relevant models as we can and recommend the watches that do the best job of making a smartwatch convenient and useful. We test Wear OS watches by wearing them while they’re connected to Android phones. Whenever possible, we ask other people to try out our potential picks to get an idea of how others react to a watch’s size, style, interface and other features.

In descending order of importance, these are the things we think matter when it comes to recommending a smartwatch for most people:

• How well the watch handles notifications from your phone. In particular, how easy it is to read, dismiss or respond to notifications, whether by tapping, typing or speaking, and how well you can filter the notifications coming into your watch.  
• How the buttons, spinning crown, turning bezel and/or touchscreen of a watch function, and how they feel to use many times per day.
• How the watch feels, looks and functions on your wrist. This includes the strap, the case and how it feels and looks on all sizes of wrists. It’s a notable plus if a watch is available in a variety of styles and or sizes.  
• Whether the battery can last at least a full, active day (16 to 18 hours).  
• How useful the voice functions are, both in speech-to-text messaging and replies, and, where applicable, for the digital assistant (Google Now or S-Voice) function.  
• How well the watch functions as a basic fitness tracker, so you don’t need to wear two devices on your wrist for things like step tracking, roughly accurate (but not exact) tracking of long walks, runs or cycling sessions and reminders to not stay too sedentary.
• How useful the watch’s built-in apps are, and how extensive the selection of third-party apps (and, to a lesser extent, watch faces) is.  

Our pick: Fossil Q Explorist/Venture

Fossil’s Q Explorist and its smaller-wrist counterpart the Q Venture are well-made, responsive, fashionable Wear OS smartwatches that offer a lot of colour and band options, making them the best option around. They ably run Wear OS (more on the pros and cons of Wear OS itself in a bit) and convey your phone’s notifications to your wrist. Their buttons engage with clean clicks, the Explorist’s centre crown moves through lists and notifications much more effectively than swiping, and both screens are responsive and clear.

The Explorist and Venture cases are an average thickness for a round smartwatch (at 12.5 and 11.5 millimetres, respectively), with widths of 45 mm and 42 mm, respectively. Neither watch feels too heavy or awkward on a larger wrist, though even the smaller Venture watch is still quite chunky on a smaller wrist. Each model’s battery regularly lasted a whole day in our testing, and the voice-dictation functions are on a par with those of most smartwatches – the same goes for Google Assistant’s accuracy. Both watches and their Google Fit system track day-to-day activity, and although Wear OS apps don’t have quite the buy-in from app makers that the Apple Watch does, you can likely find your favourite apps in Google’s Play Store, and most phone apps provide rich notifications that you can interact with through the watch. Both show signs of good build quality, with thoughtful attention to detail on all surfaces and no cheap connectors or pieces.

Dealing with notifications on a Wear OS watch has got better as the phone version of Android has improved its already impressive notification system and as phone app developers have taken advantage of new interactions. Many apps now send notifications with action options: for example, you can check a to-do as done, approve a payment, respond to a message or, most often, just acknowledge something. The Q Explorist and Venture are no different than most Wear OS watches in relaying notifications, but in our testing they rarely showed lag in processing them, nor was either watch’s screen unresponsive to swiping or tapping options. Each watch’s vibration motor provides just enough buzz and movement to avoid missing things while not feeling like electric collar training for humans.

The three buttons on the Q Explorist are useful and responsive, although the middle crown’s button action may be a bit too responsive. The newest versions of Wear OS allow you to set each of the two clicky side buttons (at the 2 and 4 o’clock positions) as a shortcut to any function on the watch when on the home screen. Clicking the centre button wakes up the watch and brings you back to your home watch-face display, and holding it down activates Google Assistant. The Q Explorist’s centre button has a mushier action to it than the Digital Crown on the Apple Watch, and its rotation is stiffer (more on that below), but it works, and turning a crown is easier to do in more situations than continually flicking upward on a touchscreen. The Venture lacks the two side buttons, and its crown cannot turn through lists. While the turning crown is a helpful upgrade, the Venture’s push-button response is firmer and better than on the Explorist, and its screen response is fast enough to make the lack of physical input tolerable.

The Q watch screens are fully round, without the flat tyre look of some round Wear OS watches, but they still include an automatic brightness sensor, and that counts as progress in the long run of Android smartwatches. Both watches’ screens look sharp and get bright enough to read in direct sunlight.

What you think of the Q watches’ design depends on which model you buy, and in which configuration. We tested a Q Explorist in its smoked stainless steel look and a Q Venture in rose gold with leather. But if you don’t like the size of these two models or the available styles, you can buy one of more than 300 planned smartwatches from 14 of Fossil’s fashion brands and get the same technology inside, just with different cases, straps and buttons. There are Kate Spade smartwatches, Rs 15 lakh Tag Heuer smartwatches and many more from Diesel, Skagen, Armani Exchange and the like, all offered under Fossil Group’s umbrella. You can probably find a smartwatch with a case, band and look that looks like something you want to wear on your wrist every day, rather than settling for close enough. Fossil’s Q watches, though, hit a good balance of sensible and stylish, with a reasonable price to match.

Battery life for the Q watches is unremarkably reliable, and that’s the best thing you can say about a touchscreen smartwatch. The Q Explorist never ran out of juice entirely while wearing it, even after having it be the primary turn-by-turn direction notifier on two one-hour drives, followed by 30 minutes of actively tracked cycling and the usual all-day text/app notifications. While we didn’t wear the Venture for full days of testing, most reviews find no fault with the battery. The USB charger is a basic magnetic disc that slides onto the rounded back of the watch (though it could stand to stick onto the watch more strongly, like the Apple Watch’s similar disc).

Using your voice with the Google Assistant function built into the Q watches (and every modern Wear OS watch) is generally okay, though only roughly 80% reliable. The combination of a microphone on the side of your watch, a Bluetooth connection to your phone when you’re away from Wi-Fi, your phone’s cellular Web connection and the imperfect acknowledgement of human speech by Google Assistant do not make for anything near a 100% success rate. When it works, Google Assistant makes you feel connected and advanced, when it fails, you can be seen as a person who asks their wrist about the capital of Malaysia. This is more a reflection of the state of connectivity and digital assistants than of the Q watches themselves – or any Wear OS watch, for that matter – although in our experience Wear OS watches fail on voice queries more often than Siri on the Apple Watch. That said, voice dictation on the Q watches is far more reliable, at least when it comes to recognising words and phrases, than Google Assistant. If transcription fails, it’s more likely to be because of the watch/phone connection than the watch mishearing your words.

The Q watches do not have built-in GPS or heart-rate sensors, and aside from one model (the black silicone strap Explorist), they are not made for heavy exercise tracking. The watches’ IP67 rating means that they’re dustproof and ready for rain, and that they can survive a short dunk in water less than 3 feet deep. For tracking your walking, movement, light bike rides or occasional runs or hikes, though, the watch does fine.

You can swap the default metal or leather band of your Q watch for any 22- or 18-millimetre strap (for the Explorist and Venture, respectively) with standard pin connectors, though, as with changing the band on most traditional watches, it’s a finicky process you won’t want to have to do every day.

Many major phone apps have Wear OS counterparts, or at least most apps that make sense to have a dedicated watch app. You’ll likely find yourself using most watch apps less than you might think, but they are sometimes convenient for avoiding a phone retrieval. I regularly use the Nest app for my home thermostat, Keep to take down a quick voice note, PocketCasts to control podcast episodes and playlists and Stronglifts to time and track workouts. But I use these on my watch mostly when my phone is not at hand, none is easier to use than its phone version. As noted, most apps on your phone will provide notifications that can be acted upon through your watch. For the apps that you do use, the Q watches’ screen (identical to most of the Fossil group watches’ screens) is responsive enough to work with tiny buttons pressed by big fingers.

Other reviewers also like the Q watches. Simon Hill at Digital Trends writes that the Q Explorist is “an attractive smartwatch to use with an Android phone that will blend in at work or play at an affordable price”, and that, aside from the Apple Watch and the Gear Sport (for Samsung phone owners), the Q Explorist “compares favourably with the rest of the field”. Gerald Lynch at TechRadar
summarises the Venture as “a sharp-looking, comfortable smartwatch with a great display and responsive processor”, but knocks it for lacking GPS and a heart-rate monitor. Matthew Miller at ZDNet believes the Explorist and Venture are “priced fairly for nice looking fashion watches that also serve as smartwatches”.

Reviews for various fashion smartwatches under Fossil’s umbrella vary, but most agree that the screens are sharp and readable, the watches are snappy and responsive, and build quality is notably better than the plastic-and-siliconised-rubber designs that were common on earlier smartwatches.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

As mentioned, the rotating crown on the Q watches is a bit stiffer than it should be. This makes it somewhat more difficult to spin through notifications or scroll through a longer bit of text with the tip of one finger. The fix is to push the crown forward or backward from a lower angle, or roll more of your finger over it. It’s easier to turn with two fingers, but that’s definitely not a convenient gesture, you’ll likely just learn to get the rolling right.

If you wear the Q Explorist close to your hand, its case size and protruding centre button can activate when you bend your wrist back, or if you’re wearing thicker gloves. The worst that happens is that Google Assistant is activated, and it either does nothing or tries to ask Google whatever nonsense the microphone picks up inadvertently. That can be annoying, and may cause you to size your watch band a bit larger, so the watch sits up your arm a bit more, clear of your wrist joint. Sadly, Wear OS lacks a left-handed mode to allow for turning the watch and its gestures the other direction.

Most of our other issues with the Q watches are not specific to these two Fossil watches but to Wear OS as a whole. For example, there is no built-in tool that encourages you to move like the Apple Watch and Samsung Gear watches do. You can find a number of third-party apps that do this in the Play Store, but you shouldn’t have to go hunting.

About Wear OS

Most smartwatches available to pair to Android phones run Wear OS, which, while improved in its 2.0 version, needs some refinement before it’s going to appeal to anyone only casually interested in a smartwatch.

Wear OS’s chief problem, as we see it, is that it relies too much on input from swipes, taps and other finger gestures. On a largish screen, such as on our top pick, this is less of a problem, but on smaller devices, trying to hit just the right button on the screen is like playing a very small version of Duck Hunt. The Apple Watch, by comparison, makes most of its buttons screen-wide rounded rectangles, which are easier to hit. On newer watches with three buttons, Wear OS also doesn’t utilise the physical controls beyond the home display (watch face), where they serve as shortcuts to apps or a list of apps.

Finding and installing apps is another sore point. Android Wear 2.0 has two ways of installing apps: on the watch directly, which is woefully awkward, or through the Play Store on the Web, which is okay. Watch faces for Wear OS exist in the kind of state Android phone apps were in during their earliest days – all over the place, so good luck searching. Watch makers would do well to include some sensible, category-spanning offerings by default in their devices.

Finally, Wear OS has a problem that’s seemingly random and hard to understand: “can’t reach Google at the moment.” Having tested at least a dozen Wear OS watches, we can say that an unexplained failure when using voice commands is the most common negative trait for all of them. It’s impossible for the layperson to understand which part of the watch-to-phone-to-internet relay is falling down, but it can happen at any time, even right after you’ve used the watch to do something else successfully. When Google Assistant is made the centre of Android watches, not being able to reach Google Assistant lowers the value of that watch considerably.

Runner-up: Samsung Gear Sport

If you don’t need your smartwatch to look business-casual, you want more fitness and exercise features than our top pick or you’re a Samsung loyalist, the Samsung Gear Sport is a better pick for you. (You can use the Gear Sport with non-Samsung phones, but doing so requires that you install at least four apps.) The Gear Sport handles all the casual notification and message-triage functions of a smartwatch about as well as our top pick – with the exception of voice transcription – but it adds heart-rate monitoring, GPS tracking, swim tracking and built-in reminders to move throughout the day. It doesn’t do all of these things perfectly, but it does just enough to make for a generally useful smartwatch, with great battery life and a clever interface.

Like previous Gear watches, the Gear Sport uses a rotating bezel and two side buttons for most of its navigation. This works better than you’d think by looking at it, and it’s a boon to those who wear gloves for part of the year. In fact, we actually prefer this approach to Wear OS or the Apple Watch: rotating through your home screens, notifications, lists of apps or messages happens at remarkable speed for a tiny device. The screen is 1.2 inches and 360 pixels in diameter, but it’s brighter than our pick’s, and it looks decent enough while displaying most content, though text isn’t as sharp as on the Fossil screens. The watch itself is not small, at 43 and 44 mm wide and tall, respectively, and 11.6 mm thick, but it’s nowhere near as beefy as our prior pick, the Gear S3.

The Sport’s built-in fitness features do a decent job of motivating you to move more, tracking a Fitbit-like set of metrics: stairs climbed, steps taken and minutes active. It reminds you to get up every hour or so and suggests stretches and movements you can do at your desk if you’re stuck there. While the Sport can track your movement and exercise, and start doing so automatically, it is not accurate enough for dedicated runners or cyclists (who should get a GPS running watch instead): influential fitness gear tester Ray Maker (aka DC Rainmaker) clocked “the worst GPS track accuracy I’ve ever seen on a run” wearing the Gear Sport. We didn’t see quite the same entirely-different-street discrepancies in biking tests, but the Sport is nevertheless not a competitive training tool, providing only a rough guide to distance and speed.

To round off the Gear Sport’s positives, it has very solid battery life (almost never less than 50% of the battery remaining after a full day) and if you have a Samsung phone, it integrates easily with most of the apps you have installed there. The Gear Sport is easier to set up with a non-Samsung Android phone than previous versions of the Gear watch, too. It still requires the installation of at least four apps and some regular updating, but it’s not the hour-long trial-and-error of other Gear watches we’ve tested, working reliably in our testing.

Aside from its jack-of-all-fitness-trades, master-of-none nature, the Gear Sport has other drawbacks. Chief among them is that voice dictation is significantly less reliable than on the Apple Watch or Wear OS and is best used for short phrases and quick replies. Then there’s S Voice, the digital assistant that can’t do much – and you probably don’t have time to learn how to make it do the few things it can do. And major apps still do not have a presence in Samsung’s marketplace – the Sport runs Samsung’s Tizen operating system instead of Wear OS – so any app or device you want to control directly on your phone is a gamble on an indie developer having the same need.

As a piece of hardware, the Gear Sport is probably the best smartwatch we’ve used. It’s not stylish, it has deep flaws in its voice software and it’s only a beginner-level fitness tracker. But if you want a smartwatch that has a bit of fitness motivation – and if you also happen to have a Samsung phone, or might get a deal on a bundle of phone and watch – the Gear Sport is a good option.

The competition

We have considered and passed on recommending a large number of watches over the years. Here are the ones we’ve considered recently:

The TicWatch E uses outdated processors and arrives very late in the lifespan of this version of Wear OS – with a new Qualcomm chip arriving in early September, there’s not a compelling reason to invest in an Android smartwatch from a lesser-known vendor right now. Beyond that, although it packs in a lot of features, including onboard GPS, a heart-rate monitor and a light-adjusting display, the TicWatch E looks and feels toy-like, with an all-plastic body, matte silicone strap and undistinguished look. It also has a single, non-turning button, which makes it less usable with the latest Wear OS interface. It runs Wear OS fairly well on its budget-minded processor, but Wear OS running even at its intended responsiveness is still not that exciting.

The TicWatch Pro shares the TicWatch E model’s older processor and late arrival, and it would be just another big (45 mm case), thick (12.6 mm) Android smartwatch, if not for its trick of having an old-fashioned-looking LCD screen that the watch switches to when you’re not actively looking at it or using it. This feature extends battery life significantly, especially if you go for periods in Essential Mode, where you see only the LCD screen showing the time, date, and your step count. But the transition from the LCD screen back to a smart OLED screen is not smooth or quick, and if you switch the watch to Essential Mode, you have to reboot it to get back to regular smartwatch functions.

The Amazfit Bip is thin and light, looks like an Apple Watch, has a lot of sensors inside – GPS, heart rate, accelerometers, barometer and compass – and can run for about 30 days (which we confirmed) between charges, all for under Rs 8,000. Those facts are compelling, but actually using the watch is frustrating, and it doesn’t do any one thing well. The GPS and heart-rate monitors can be slow to start, sometimes drop out, occasionally have wild inaccuracies and produce results notably different from those of running watches and dedicated fitness bands. The screen is also dim and noticeably low-resolution, and the phone software for managing the watch is dense and unintuitive on Android. (We didn’t test iOS, but the reviews imply that it’s not much different.) The watch materials are plastic and rubber, and look and feel like it. Those are all trade-offs you could reasonably make if you just wanted a Pebble-like smartwatch that tracked steps and showed notifications, but even there, the Bip does not succeed: it often dropped connectivity with my phone (a Pixel 2), and it cannot show emoji – getting a dozen blank squares when someone sends you a thumbs-up sign is not helpful. If all you care about is battery life, the Bip has that, but it lacks useful functions while it’s charged up.

The Fitbit Versa is nearly a full smartwatch, but the way it handles notifications prevents it from being a pick. Fitbit’s sleep, step and workout tracking features beat our current picks’, and in our testing the Versa regularly lasted for four or more days between full charges. It lacks GPS, which the Ionic has, but it has a lower price as a result. You can choose from a decent variety of band types, although the bands are an odd 23 mm size (rather than a standard 22 mm), and slot in at an angle, making it hard to know if an unofficial band will fit. You can control the music on your phone (after reconnecting your watch in classic mode) or transfer your own music to the watch, though it’s a tedious process involving a computer and cable. Where the Versa falls short is in working with notifications from your phone. The notifications pile up, and it can be a hassle to clear them, most notifications don’t expand to show more text and though a software update has given you quick replies to select from, you’re limited to five of them. Like the Ionic, it’s more of a smartened-up fitness tracker than a fitness-savvy smartwatch.

The Samsung Gear S3 was our prior pick for Samsung phone owners because of its smooth dial rotation and interface. But it was notably large, with a 46 mm face, and the Frontier model was half an inch thick, notably bulky even for a smartwatch. The Gear Sport, our runner-up pick, is less bulky, less expensive, less overtly masculine-styled and provides most of the same features, minus the LTE option.

Two watches from LG, the Watch Sport and Watch Style, were designed in collaboration with Google to launch Android Wear 2.0. The Sport is loaded with features, offering integrated GPS, LTE calls and texting (sharing a phone number with an Android phone), a speaker, a heart-rate monitor, two buttons and a rotating crown. Reviews, however, suggest that the Sport suffers for those add-ons in thickness, comfort, and appearance. The Style is thinner and more comfortable than the Sport, it offers Bluetooth and Wi-Fi but has a look that The Verge’s Dan Seifert describes as “kind of cheap” with a “homely design”. Neither model is easy to find at online vendors, especially in all colours.

The Fitbit Ionic works fine as a Fitbit tracker, but despite being more expensive than some of our picks or the Apple Watch Series 1, it lacks many smartwatch functions you’d hope to have. It passes notifications from your phone to the watch, but you can only respond to some of them (with only five quick reply lines), and dismissing them (either one by one or as a group) involves annoyingly hard presses and long scrolls. Syncing music files and offline Pandora playlists requires you to use a desktop app, which is laborious. Two Wirecutter writers who tested the Ionic also had trouble setting it up to work with their Android phones (a 2015 Moto X Pure and a 2016 Samsung Galaxy S7) and had to perform significant troubleshooting to get their data to sync. The Ionic’s battery life, even while using GPS for outdoor exercise tracking, is its most impressive feature, lasting at least five days in one test and nearly seven days in another. The Ionic is most useful to Fitbit enthusiasts who want to track outdoor exercise without bringing a phone, it’s not a good option if you’re looking to deal with incoming information.

Huawei’s Watch 2 looks like a logical follow-up to the original Huawei Watch. It adds built-in GPS capability and it ships with Android Wear 2.0. The problem is that the Huawei Watch 2’s bezel does not rotate, and it has no rotating crown to take advantage of Android Wear 2.0’s scrolling interfaces. That wouldn’t be so bad if the thick, notched bezel weren’t significantly raised around the screen, making it more difficult than it should be to swipe between screens, scroll through apps or perform pinpoint taps near the edge of the screen. Beyond that, the watch is thick (12.6 mm, or 2.6 mm more than the ZenWatch 3, though that’s still slightly thinner than the original Huawei Watch), and it seems slower to respond to input and to launch apps than other modern Wear OS watches. It doesn’t seem worth its price for most people.