Tag: fitness trackers

Our Favorite Garmin Smartwatches Are on Sale

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to celebrate the start of the spring season, Garmin is holding a sale on various gadgets and accessories—including a few WIRED-approved smartwatches. Whether you’re a novice runner or a seasoned hiker, we’re confident that at least one of the discounted smartwatches below will make the perfect companion for your next outdoor adventure.

These deals aren’t just at Garmin either—we’ve also linked to other retailers like Amazon and Target. Don’t see anything you like here? Check out our buying guides, like the Best Fitness Trackers, the Best Sleep Trackers, or the Best Camping Tents.

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Garmin Smartwatch Deals

Garmin Instinct 2 Solar Smartwatch

Photograph: Garmin

WIRED senior associate reviews editor Adrienne So says this is currently her favorite smartwatch. The second-generation version (9/10, WIRED Recommends) comes with a high-resolution display, improved solar charging, and an insanely impressive 21-day battery life (even when tracking multiple activities per day), all packed into a compact 40-mm case. (You can also choose a 45-mm or 50-mm size.) It’s a great option for tracking outdoor workouts or activities like camping, trail running, and more. The price has dipped as low as $300 back in November, but this is still a great deal.

Forerunner 255

Photograph: Garmin

The Forerunner 255 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) holds the title of Best Running Watch in our Best Fitness Trackers guide. It packs a ton of great features, including multiband GPS support, a compass, a barometric altimeter, Bluetooth compatibility with a variety of heart rate monitors, and improved sleep tracking. It has excellent battery life, too—WIRED reviewer Scott Gilbertson says he got about 30 hours of continuous use. You’ll also have access to useful features like Morning Report (which includes a daily greeting, weather, and more) and Body Battery (which measures your energy throughout the day, based on other metrics like activity, sleep, and VO₂ Max). It dipped slightly lower to $239 earlier this month, but it’s still a good deal.

Garmin Venu SQ

Photograph: Garmin

The Venu SQ (8/10, WIRED Recommends) was released back in 2020, but Garmin wearables are known for their longevity. This is still a great entry-level fitness tracker. It has an always-on LCD touchscreen that’s both responsive and bright, along with high-end features like energy level monitoring, blood oxygen monitoring, and sleep tracking—in addition to tracking basic metrics like step count, calories, workouts, and more. The Venu SQ often dips to this price at Amazon and reached as low as $116 in January, but this is still a solid deal.

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March 27, 2024
Amazfit Balance Review: Most Improved, Still Exasperating

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Of all the fitness trackers that I’ve tested, none has made a bigger leap in hardware development than Amazfit. The first iterations that I tried in 2018 were plasticky and horrible. Every year, the wearable has gotten steadily, well, more wearable. A coworker recently asked if my tester Balance was a Samsung Galaxy Watch6 (7/10, WIRED Recommends). That’s high praise!

The Balance is Amazfit’s general purpose fitness tracker, aimed at promoting “wellness of body and mind.” It looks … well, it looks like a Galaxy Watch6, with a slightly different top button, and ideally it would work in the same way by tracking your sleep, heart rate, and activities, as well as taking your calls. It also comes with a bevy of optional AI-powered tools to help you sleep, meditate, and exercise. Right now, though, it’s just still too buggy, which is especially obvious with a seamlessly functioning tester Garmin on my opposite wrist.

Red Flag

As with most fitness trackers, I check the company’s privacy policy to see how it will use such intimate information. It’s usually easy to find, and it usually looks similar to Google’s—no data used for ads, et cetera. The Balance’s privacy policy is unusually hard to find. According to Amazfit’s website, the privacy policy explicitly does not apply to Amazfit trackers, nor does Zepp Health’s policy. There’s no privacy policy in the product manual, either. I asked Amazfit for a link to the privacy policy that applies to this tracker and got no response.

Even if everything is aboveboard, the company has made it very difficult to find out what’s happening to your data. If that matters to you, you should probably stop reading here.

With that said, the Balance is a very light, good-looking, and low-profile fitness tracker. Despite having such a big case—46 mm across, 10.6 mm deep—it didn’t feel large or obtrusive on my 150-mm wrist. The bezel is sleek gray aluminum, and it has two buttons on the left hand side to control it, as well as a tempered glass AMOLED touchscreen.

Photograph: Adrienne So

The screen is clear, bright, and responsive—maybe a little too responsive. It started and stopped workouts accidentally whenever I fidgeted with my jacket cuffs in Oregon’s cold, gray weather. The battery life theoretically lasts 14 days, but with a few tracked activities per day (walking my dog, running, indoor workouts), I did have to charge it once in the past two weeks. It charged relatively quickly, though—it went from 15 to 65 percent capacity in the 45 minutes that I was waiting for a plane at the airport.

It has a water resistance rating of 5 ATM, which means that you can use it while swimming (if not while taking a shower, weirdly). (By way of contrast, my favorite Garmin Instinct 2 is rated to 10 ATM, and I have used it snorkeling and surfing without issue.)

Like most higher-end fitness trackers these days, it comes with a bevy of sensors and tools. These include onboard GPS with dual-band positioning that helps the tracker filter out environmental noise; an acceleration sensor, gyroscope, ambient light sensor, temperature sensor, and a couple of biometric sensors for measuring your heart rate and blood oxygen and so forth. It also has a microphone and an incredibly loud speaker, and my favorite, most comfortable nylon strap.

Add It Up

Amazfit is owned by Zepp, formerly known as Huami, and the app that the Balance uses is Zepp Health. Zepp Health used to be almost unusably annoying, but the app’s homepage has been cleaned up quite a bit. Zepp Health now features a Readiness score, which is similar to that of Fitbit’s Daily Readiness or Garmin’s Body Battery, but you can still check the company’s previous general purpose metric, which was PAI. The company developed its PAI score using the research of Ulrik Wisløff, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. It uses your age, sex, resting heart rate, and past seven days of heart rate data to calculate just how much activity you should be getting.

Photograph: Adrienne So

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March 16, 2024
8 Best Sleep Trackers (2024): Expert Tips and Research

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Sleep Routine: Tracker & Alarm for $7/month or $60/year (iOS/Android): You don’t necessarily need a new gadget, because there are several sleep-tracking apps. I tested Sleep Routine on my iPhone 14 Pro. The app provides a report for each night, breaking your sleep into awake, light, deep, and REM. The results seemed accurate and broadly matched the Ultrahuman Ring Air. You can add notes to help it better understand your sleep, and it builds a sleep pattern analysis and shows your statistics over time. The smart alarm function wakes you gently. You can try Sleep Routine for a week before you need to subscribe. The problem? The app can be a bit wonky. A couple of times in a week, I got an error message in the morning with no report or a very short recorded sleep. Annoyingly, there was no indication of why it failed.

Withings ScanWatch 2 for $350: Wear the Withings ScanWatch 2 (7/10, WIRED recommends) to bed and you will get a sleep score out of 100 in the morning. It covers the same four stages as other trackers (awake, REM, light, and deep) but boasts a PPG sensor for measuring your respiratory rate. It can also track your heart rate, temperature, and blood oxygen levels. The ScanWatch 2 provides a wealth of data and advice in the Withings app. But some folks may find it bulky and uncomfortable for sleep, and it had problems distinguishing between light sleep and when I was lying awake in bed.

Google Nest Hub 2nd Gen for $79: The second-generation Nest Hub uses radar to track your sleep, which means you don’t need to wear anything, but it also has a microphone to track snoring, sleep talking, and other nocturnal sounds. I love the Nest Hub on my nightstand for smart home controls, family photos, and listening to sleep sounds or podcasts in bed, but the sleep tracking consistently overestimated my REM phases and missed periods of wakefulness that other trackers recorded. When I used multiple trackers simultaneously, the Nest Hub was the outlier.

Muse S Gen 2 Headband for $400: This headband has sensors capable of tracking your brain activity, similar to an electroencephalogram (EEG), alongside an accelerometer and gyroscope, and a PPG sensor to measure heart rate and blood circulation. It’s chiefly a meditation aid designed to help you relax, but it can also track your sleep, recording your heart rate, respiration, time to fall asleep, and how much you moved around to give you an overall sleep score. Sadly, I found it uncomfortable to wear and often woke to discover the sleep tracking had failed, usually because I’d removed it at night. It’s also far too expensive.

Kokoon Nightbuds for $285: While combining earbuds with sleep tracking is a smart idea, wearing the Nightbuds made it harder for me to fall asleep. These tiny earbuds plug into a curved control unit designed to sit on the back of your head, and they’re relatively comfy since everything is covered in pliable silicone. The companion app plays meditations, soothing sounds, and sleep stories to help you drop off or drown out a snoring partner. You can also connect via Bluetooth to play your own content. The sleep tracking is limited, showing the familiar four phases, sleep efficiency, and consistency, but I often woke to find they had come off during the night and cut my sleep tracking short. I am about to test the Philips Sleep Headphones, but they appear to be a rebranded version of these.

Biostrap Kairos for $900: This lightweight wrist-worn band has a PPG sensor and accelerometer to track your heart rate, respiration, and HRV. It tracks sleep broken into awake, light, and deep sleep (REM will be added soon), and combines your biometrics to give you a sleep score. It also surveys you each morning on sleep quality, and how refreshed you feel, plus asks about how you felt when you woke and before you went to sleep. It seems quite accurate, but it’s designed for researchers, medical staff, and organizations looking to monitor employee health or study the impact of new services or products, so it’s unavailable for most folks to buy.

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March 12, 2024
Hands-On With Samsung’s Health-Hacking Galaxy Ring

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Pak says the ring will use Samsung’s “leading sensor technology” and long battery life to deliver advanced sleep insights that include heart health monitoring.

One of the core features is the My Vitality Score, which purports to show your mental and physical readiness for the day. It’s based on a clinically validated model from the University of Georgia that initiates a “cognitive load test” to see how ready you are when you wake up for the day—not unlike the Daily Readiness Score on Fitbits and Garmin’s Body Battery. This feature will be making its way to Galaxy Watches, too.

This is paired with Booster Cards, which will offer “scientifically-backed insights” for ring bearers to stay boosted and energized throughout the day, with recommendations for better habits, too. Watchmaker Citizen attempted to introduce a smartwatch last year that had a similar feature, but the device was pulled from shelves as it had numerous bugs and issues.

The Galaxy Ring is surprisingly lightweight and comfortable, but no word yet on battery life.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

I got a chance to touch and hold the Galaxy Ring, and it’s surprisingly lightweight and comfortable. There are several sizes from which to choose, and there will be a fitting process to dial down the ring option for your fingers. Samples on show were available in gold, silver, and dark gray, but Samsung reiterated that things were subject to change. Pak was also coy about sharing what materials the ring is made from, but says Samsung has durability in mind.

The Galaxy Ring will have 24/7 health tracking, but Pak couldn’t share exact battery life estimations. He says there’s a certain expectation of “more than a couple of days” when it comes to smart rings, but Samsung is working right now to extend the battery life as much as possible. The Oura Ring, for context, can get anywhere between three to five days in our testing; the Ultrahuman Ring Air lasts roughly four days.

The Galaxy Ring only works with Android phones (sorry iPhone owners), and while it currently has a complementary relationship with the smartphone and the Galaxy Watch, Pak repeatedly mentioned that Samsung is exploring how the Ring can be incorporated with other Samsung hardware and appliances. We’ll have to wait and see how that plays out.

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February 26, 2024