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Consumer Intelligence

3 Standout Smart Watches

Jeff Bertolucci

By Jeff Bertolucci

Published Sept. 19, 2014

3 Standout Smart Watches
Chester Gould, the inventor of Dick Tracy and his iconic two-way wrist radio, could not have imagined the real thing. Teamed with your smart phone, a smart watch can display real-time fitness data; show phone, text and social-media messages; and even act as a remote control for your phone's music player. And it could come in handy any time you'd rather keep your smart phone tucked away. Caveat: So-called wearable devices are still rough around the edges. But the three below are standouts in a rapidly evolving genre.

Wrist-ready style. Slightly larger than a conventional watch, the Sony SmartWatch 2 ($200) has a sleek and fashionable aluminum case and a silicon or stainless-steel wristband. The SmartWatch, which syncs to your phone, vibrates softly when you get a call, e-mail or text message (including friends' Facebook and Twitter posts). With a Bluetooth headset, you can use it to make and receive phone calls, view a list of recent calls, and control (play, stop and skip) songs on your phone. The 1.6-inch LCD screen is easy to read in bright sunlight, although the colorful 220-by-176-pixel resolution lacks the crispness of current smart-phone displays. The device runs three to four days between charges.

The SmartWatch 2 works only with smart phones running Android 4.0 or higher. To pair them, you either touch the SmartWatch to your phone (if it's NFC-compatible) or use Bluetooth to link the devices. The SmartWatch comes with a few preinstalled apps, but you have to go to the Google Play store to download the really useful stuff. We found some of the apps a bit glitchy, and the user experience was far from seamless.

Long-distance runner. The Magellan Echo ($150) is less ambitious than the Sony SmartWatch. It connects with your smart phone, but you cannot send and receive calls. But what the Echo does, it does well: display real-time feedback from sports apps, such as MapMyRun, Strava and Wahoo Fitness, running on your Apple iOS device. (Android support is "coming soon," Magellan says.) The Echo has a decidedly athletic look, and it can run for months on a single inexpensive lithium battery. But miserly energy consumption involves trade-offs. The Echo's 1-inch, 128-by-128-pixel display is reasonably easy to read, but it's small and drab. Just to be clear: You'll need to bring along your iPhone, too, which could prove cumbersome for runners.

Versatile switch hitter. Of the three watches in this review, we'd choose the upstart Pebble ($150), whose development was funded by a Kickstarter campaign. It is more versatile than the fitness-oriented Echo, and unlike the Android-only SmartWatch 2, it works with either Android or iOS--plus it costs less. Like the SmartWatch, the Pebble syncs via Bluetooth to your phone or headset to make calls, and runs a few bare-bones apps that let you display phone-call, text and social-media notifications. It also shows real-time data from fitness apps, and it lets you manage songs playing on your phone.

The Pebble has a slim, polycarbonate case. (A more rugged version, the Pebble Steel, is sheathed in stainless steel and costs $250.) It runs five to seven days between charges, a little longer than the SmartWatch. Its 1.26-inch, 144-by-168-pixel display is reasonably sharp. The Pebble's stable of popular apps is growing, with Yelp, Foursquare, ESPN and Pandora expected to release Pebble-specific versions soon.

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Jeff Bertolucci is a Contributing Writer at Kiplinger's Personal Finance.

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