Com. Today is mr tick's pix day i'm, going to show you which of all these different, smart watches i've been reviewing this past year. I would recommend – and i would choose and why? What are the criteria that you should look for in a smart watch and which one probably is right for you now that's a big big thing to try to answer for everyone, because we're all different but i'm, going to do my best to give you my criteria And see if it fits with yours and then just adjust make it fit for you. First of all, we've got major categories: we've got health watches and bands and that's the stuff that encompasses doing body readings and things giving you information on your basic health. Like heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen, sleep apnea, if you're going into low blood oxygen, while asleep holding your breath that can even wake you up when that's happening. Lorenz scatter, diagrams you've got ecg, charts, instantaneous or continuous, continuous heart rate, continuous blood pressure. And what comes out of all of that? You even have temperature emerging now in some of these watches and fancy things like rings. That does a lot of that stuff. While you just wear it on your finger with sensors built in rechargeable battery amazing amazing health, then you've got fitness now. Fitness is way different than health, but they do overlap. Fitness is where you're going to get out and exercise, and i mean you're going to really do it and that could mean swimming.
It could mean running and cycling and biking. It could mean you want to hike. You want to know your altitude up and down. You want to know your distance traveled. You want to see the track that you went into the forest or just where you drove your car and how long it took to get to work when you put it in cycling load like mr tix, does. All of that falls under fitness and you've got really detailed stuff in there, like assessing your overall health i'm, giving you recommendations on whether you should work out today or take a rest, monitor the tiny temperature differential when you're sleeping to let you know, if you're getting Sick or not, maybe you want to take it easy that's in the ring all of that's in a fitness watch. Oh then, we got specialty, watches and we'll talk a little bit about that uh things that have earbuds built into them: innovative, huh, uh and and other little goodies that are kind of unique and then and then the big category of all which most of you come Here to uh to learn about and that's android smart watches. These are smart watches that carry the android operating system. They work just like a standard android phone. Pretty much except the screen is a time piece rather than just your opening screen on your phone, but you can install all your android apps. You can communicate with it. You can do phone calls, you can do text messaging, you can do all sorts of stuff, so we're going to begin there.
Ah android smart watches 2020 has been an interesting year and actually 2019 began this new wave of larger size screens and limited capabilities it's on the foot tails of the early 2019 late 2018, where we used to have ambient screens sort of like what you're. Seeing on this one, which is in a low power, special sleep mode, but this was built into all of them and it was the kind of thing where, when the main screen went out, it would light up with a little analog clock with dial. Remember and then you twist your wrist and it would go out of that and go back into the that's, not in the new android phones, uh watches. You have to go way back to get that. Also, these things uh, all of them all of them – have a place to put a sim card in it, so you can use them as a regular telephone. This one's, deep inside you can put in your phone number. You can make calls receive calls text messaging and even use a data plan from your sim card to use the watch on the internet when you're out away from your wi fi zone. Oh yeah, they all support wi fi. What they don't have in the new crop of these is the ability to do bluetooth. Tethering. If you remember back in 2017, 2018 and android 5.1 was big in these watches. You could make bluetooth calls and you could put in a sim call.
It was dual mode, they called it. You make a call and before you place the call it would say, do you want to make it through your phone or do you want to make it through your watch and you could choose which number you wanted really good stuff, it's gone, it's gone. The only way you get, that is to buy an android 5.1 watts from ebay because you can't buy them on the market anymore, but these are the android 7 watches and they do sim card calling, but no bluetooth calling or texting directly let's go into what i Would recommend out of several that have come out this year kind of fall into these three different areas and it's? Just what you like honorable mention. I have to say now, as honorable mention goes to the kronos blade genesis that's this one right here for its innovative design, in particular the fact that it put a camera on the top instead of over here on the side and married that, with a very special Screen that's full color beautiful indoors, but you go outdoors colors fade away. It becomes kind of a black and white screen, but it's totally visible in bright, sunlight, it's, a reflective screen and because of that and the camera here, you could easily take pictures outdoors, that's, a limitation has been with other uh android watches, and so honorable mention to The spoven blade, i would recommend it as one of the best, if not the best, watches, to get but it's no longer available.
You see, they only did a limited run of about 500 of them and unfortunately, due to coronavirus and other complications, it doesn't look like there's going to be a second run. We hope there'll be an updated version coming out, but for right now, that's probably only available on ebay as well. This the um genesis. Now these two watches these two, i would say, depending on what you like and want in a watch they're, both on par with each other. In fact, all of them running android 7 have the core apps in them, they're just basic you've, seen them over and over again. If you've watched this channel so what's different hardware design, this puppy is called the s08 it's, also known as a road bid brave. This one is waterproof. I mean seriously waterproof diving down to like 30 to 50 meters, um, really you can swim with this one for sure and not have to worry about it. It'S really been the first android watch, that's been that's held up to uh to being taken under water camera. On the side, yeah that's kind of an awkward place, to put it shoots into your hand, if you move your hand and a front facing camera for doing um, video chat and any of that kind of stuff. Now this one this so waterproof that's. What you'd want that? One for otherwise they're pretty much equal! This one has front facing camera it's, not necessarily waterproof to dunk underwater it's water, safe in that, like you're, not gon na sweat and get anything in it because there's, no openings whatsoever on the bottom, not even the charging dock.
So how do you charge the thing you open it up? He says and that's there you go that's what's cool about this one. You see it's a clamshell type of a a device that has a sim card capability here, the chargers underneath and look at that it's. A rear facing camera, this one was on the top facing out this one when it's on your arm and raised up is on the back facing out, and this one is on the side facing over. This is in a sleep mode now, like all these could be put in that too and i'm going to show you i just come in here, tap and hold and take it out of the power. Save mode cancel back and now i'm in a watch face, and i have all the flexibility that you normally have in these android watches and, of course all of these i could put into that same mode because that's part of the android operating system whoops. Well, you saw it, it went into it and it canceled out of it, so you have all of that. But what this one brings to the table is this unique operation that allows you not only to open a clam shell, but you can twist it. So if you have it on your arm, you can twist it in any angle. You want to to take pictures once you activate the camera on it and, of course, you can just close it right back down snap it in and use it as a regular watch.
This is called the lem13 or it's, also known as a dm 28, and as far as android watches go across the board it's one that i would recommend. This is the one i use all the time when i'm going out. Oh i've even got updates coming in this one. I use too, if i'm going to be out on a sunny day and want to take pictures with it. This one i don't use much because i'm, not caring for waterproof, that isn't part of my life and i don't use a camera on the side. I would choose this one right now: um, because i really like opening it and twisting it gives me more flexibility than shooting straight out at the top. I have to turn my arm to do that and that's not even available if you're looking to buy the genesis. So as far as android watches go they're all going to be thick, but they have different designs: the lympho lem3dm28 with the shell design or oh look. It just went right into camera, see and then you can take a video or take a picture and twist it and do front facing. If you want to switch cameras or the s08 or brave as it's called those would be. The choices i'd recommend for an android smartwatch let's talk about the category of health and fitness in one watch or one band there isn't such a thing there's a huge overlap between the fitness world that has some health functions and the health world that can do a Little bit of fitness, so you can't get one device to do it all, but with two devices you pretty much can cover the whole spectrum.
So this is my recommendation. These two devices for health, fitness let's start here amaze fit t rex. By far i would say this is the best fitness device out on the mark. Oh wait, a minute. A maze fit makes all kinds of them: the stratos three, the the the bip s, the original bip there's, so many with transflective screens and everything. Why why this one lots of reasons? First of all, it has in addition to a beautiful, bright screen when it goes off, you can actually set it up to go into an ambient screen, so you get the same kind of effect of being able to see the time anytime you want to. Let me show you that there you go, this is the analog version hour, hand minute hand it's in the twist your wrist to see the time. So when it goes back to the regular time there you go and then it flips back into the ambient mode or you can choose a digital display, either way they're subdued but they're present, and that is one of the main things i'm. Looking for in a watch, especially a sports watch, so that i have that activity available to just glance see what time it is just quickly or have it light up to do whatever it's going to do. In addition to that, you've got all kinds of different activities: you've got weather in your region and wait wait. Do i show you this? The weather shows you not only the temperature that you can change celsius if you want to, but wind humidity uv – and i love this one where the sun is right now rise time set time upcoming weather is in here forecasting.
This is one of the most robust weather apps i've, seen on any watch that's another plus for this one you've got incredible details when it comes to all of your activities. Your basic step count information, your heart rate information and your activity over the whole day, i'm kind of giving you a mini review here. Pi is a number that's special to all in amaze, fit watches and um. You try to maximize that number on a daily basis. It takes a lot of stuff into consideration, but it's part of this whole thing too workouts activities. Let me show you a workout, for example, um. We want to go into the summary sorry, the activities uh here's, one right there. You get your track that it shows of what you did beyond that. You'Ve got duration, distance, all kinds of computations heart rate. Then you get into your overall charts, like your heart rate, diagram, your speed, diagram, your altitude diagram and, of course, you can throw it away and there's even more when it transfers over to the app so right on the this device. It'S got copious information related to your fitness, workout stuff, add to that count up and count down tethering to your phone and even even an onboard compass that works really really well and you've got yourself an outdoors fun fitness watch now how about the health functions in This thing well they're there but they're not as great. You really have basic heart rate.
That'S it you don't, get blood oxygen. You don't have red diodes for doing uh sleep, apnea monitoring any of that stuff. For that you need to switch to this one. What is this one? This is called the spoven blade there's several in this category that are like it long press to unlock it and as long as they're, all using the ones that you look at uh have red diodes for when you're doing blood oxygen readings, then um and they're tethering. To a specific, app i'll show you that in just a second here we go blood, oxygen, press and hold, oh, i guess it's doing it already. There you go a red and an infrared, actually two red ones, an infrared one and then the other one's green. For the other measurements – and you can get incredible stuff related to your heart health, overnight – great deep reviews on all of that we're not going to go into a lot of detail, but why the spoken blade over the other ones. For a couple of reasons. It really hugs nicely to your arm so it's, good and dark at night, even though all these lights are flashing on the bottom, but it's this little thing you can take the bands off put the module in here. These things, just snap on the end. Stick this on your chest and go into a mode where you can do a real time. Continuous ecg chart right here in the device tethered to the app and you can have ecg from connected to your body as well as running ecg directly on your arm.
Sports watch doesn't do ecg blood oxygen, sleep, apnea, um, blood pressure, any of that this puppy. When you try to do an exercise thing, it's, basically going to give you time, step count and calories burned, estimated based on how much time and what what fitness app you're doing, lousy for fitness, lousy for health, but combined together wearing one on each arm or. However, you want to do it it's great, so, when you're looking for a fitness watch or a health watch think about the apps. Definitely these are the two. I recommend any device that tethers to these two apps is great, but in particular these units i'm telling you right now. The t rex and the spoven blade h band is the health app the tethers to this one and zep what you've never heard of zepp? I bet not because zepp is a brand new incarnation of the amaze fit app if you go to look for a maze fit even if you've downloaded it before you're, not going to find it on your phone now, you know, look for zep that's, the replacement for All amaze fit devices that tethered to the amaze fit app. So when i come into zep, i just wanted to show you this here's, a beautiful overlap area between these. This is sleep, monitoring, sleep tracking, look, how nicely it's broken down deep sleep life, sleep, rem, sleep and awake time are shown throughout the chart and you have an overall score and it tells you if it's gone down or gone up, and it gives you a synopsis Of your sleep, you can input information about your sleep, and this is really cool.
It gives you a day by day or night by night comparison with others that here i fell asleep earlier than 75 percent of people longer sleep than 13 percent of people and so forth. So all of this sleep monitoring for the amaze fit watches any of them, but in particular for the t rex, because of all the other cool features. This watch has is great great, great great sleep, monitoring, stuff, h band, which tethers to all these class of watches and more but be sure you look for the ones that use red diodes for blood oxygen and other activities like sleep, apnea and lorenz scatter diagrams and On and on and on anyway, here's their sleep report of another night, where you can actually go by and highlight the amount of time you were in one minute of rem, sleep right there and so forth throughout the night when you went to bed when you got Up sleep duration periods of what you're, in the amount of awake times, falling asleep efficiency and so forth and there's another whole page when you're tying into blood oxygen. That gives you how many times and when it happened that you went into sleep apnea, those kinds of things, your blood oxygen saturation, your your lowest heart rate, your your resting heart rate, yeah, just wonderful things, so i'm, not going to go into a lot of detail Because all of these have these reviews that go into the apps, but just remember not just for these guys, but any watch that you buy it's a tandem, you're buying the unit to give you the information on it.
And you want to make sure you get good information, that's easy to use and easy to operate. But beyond that this is a sensor. Node that's going to transfer that information to a tethered app, and you want to make sure that what it shows you and how it presents it to you and how it divides it up into weekly monthly yearly daily stratified according to different criteria. You want to make sure that's presented really well too so it's a tandem operation if you're looking for the best of the best got me same thing for the health health band is great but it's pretty much useless. If you can't transfer that data over and really make some meaningful sense out of it with that said, i'll tell you. This is the best thing you could ever buy if you're into health it's the aura ring, and it is sitting here collecting data 24 7 unimaginable stuff. I highly i don't take it off while i do to charge it and that's about it. Um i this is by far the the biggest recommendation of a wearable i could offer, because i wear it all the time and i use it daily. Giving me amazing information. Tenths of a degree change in temperature overnight can give me an indicator of whether i need to rest more or i can be active. The next day i can compare and stratify things. Oh it's, just amazing. The aura ring look for the review aura ring, spoven, blade, uh, huh and t rex.
I'Ll have links for you in the show notes for those, so you may have noticed that none of the health, none of the fitness do anything related to communications, as in phone calls. So we've got a category on communications and lucky for you there's a lot of options so i'm, not actually going to give you a total recommendation on communications because you got to break it down. Do you want communications in that? You put a sim card in your watch and you can go out independently make phone calls. Well, we showed you already that android, smart watches all take sim cards. There are some on the market that are not as sophisticated as android and less expensive and we have them, of course, all reviewed here at smartwatchtix.com, and you could pick up one of those put a sim card in it and talk yourself silly right from your watch. All right, maybe you don't, want that, but you do want a bluetooth tether to your uh, your phone, so that you could make phone calls uh that way. Well, we've got options for that too, not the android ones, but there are watches out here that have that type of connectivity. In fact, any of the ones that have the little earbuds in them are going to do that automatically. This has to be tethered to your phone, to listen, to play music, to talk to siri or google, all of that stuff and, of course, tap once you can answer an incoming phone call, you could set it up so that you can make phone calls.
So we've got a whole bunch of watches that have these built in earbuds that you can consider – and there are other ones too – that will do direct bluetooth, tethering receiving calls hanging up or answering right from the watch. Alright, so we've covered direct phone calls with a sim card bluetooth, calling through your phone. What other communications do we have? Gps, yeah we've got gps and a lot of these different watches, and this thing in particular that you'll be seeing in a moment, has tracking capability. All different kinds of gps signals in it and it will be able to um give feedback to tethered phones that are looking at this watch with a sim card transmitting its uh geographic location. You can set up geo fencing, so if this watch leaves that fenced area an alarm goes off on any of the phones that are set up and you can have one two three, however many you want phones, monitoring it so it's, really um, really an interesting advancement In using gps technology, but you can use it just for tracking um your route when you're running or walking. We saw that in in the fitness for um the t rex that can do the same kind of gps, tracking, so that's more of a receiving. But it can be received and transmitted out in terms of location uh, to give you communication as well, and that brings up, of course, data communication. We had phone, we had bluetooth, tethering and gps and, of course, data will ride either from the sim card or from wi fi from android watches, or you can set your phone up as a wi fi hotspot connect that way and use your watch without a sim For high speed data directly from your phone, okay, what's left we've covered all of the communications except nfc near field communications.
This is the little chip that goes into very, very few devices that allows you, amongst a few other things, to do payment transactions if it's set up properly. Now, because nfc is a banking thing and banking is high on security, you don't find nfc chips in android phones watches you don't find them in your run of the mill earbud watches or fitness or health watches, but you do find them in apple watches, samsung, watches And wear os based watches because that's a secure operating system so of all of those, this is the one i would recommend. Obviously a samsung watch. This is the original galaxy gear, s3, classic or frontier, and the reason this one is chosen is the top of the line for communications with nfc is the fact that, not only when you enter the payment process and put in your pin that you can hold this Up to any terminal that has that symbol, you know for wireless communications, like the chip in your credit card, but this one, and only this one – the galaxy gear s3 also has the magnetic uh stripe, uh capability, meaning that you could put it up next to one Of the old terminals that doesn't take the chip cards, but you have to slide the credit card through and believe it or not. It can send the signal that's going to activate that terminal to think you slid your credit card through and process that transaction that's.
Why? I always always wear this one when i'm going out to dinner or something so that i'll be able to just simply um use my watch to make the payment great in this contactless payment era that we're in right now with the coronavirus. So take a look. The galaxy gear you call ss3 is: is the the one it's a real old one? I don't think you can even buy it new um. All in all, though, the whole galaxy watch line is really good and they just came out with the galaxy watch three, which i haven't reviewed. Yet hi bixby, okay we'll update you in a minute: doesn't use siri doesn't use uh, um, okay, you know the google thing, but it does use bixby as its communication system. So a little bit different all the way around there, but that's been in in it too. So the galaxy watch, the galaxy active all of those are also options, uh that you can look at, but only only this one will give you the magnetic stripe, nfc payment system that um still works, believe it or not at a food truck it'll get you by Not have to touch a credit card, so let's end with a few specialty devices here, we've got a bag of tricks and they all do one trick. You know it's. These are not your all inclusive devices that you're gon na want, but if, for example, you want a watch that has a sweet curved surface to it, then the t20 might be to your liking.
This doesn't do a whole lot, but it has fun with the watch faces. You can get heart rate, blood pressure, readings right on the screen and, of course, all of that stuff comes with a little bit of exercise a little bit of weather, music player, yeah and tapping. Here you can change the different backgrounds or the different watch faces themselves. T20, look for the review on the curved watch. We'Ve got the earbud kind. Now i showed you a little bit of this one. There are a bunch of different designs of watches with tws, true wireless stereo, earbuds we'll probably do a separate video on the best of the best of these coming up. In the meantime, just look for our reviews of uh smart watches with earbuds they're out there. This thing isn't even i'm. I bought this off of aliexpress.com great. If you just want to get odds and ends, i was tired of not having a tethered bluetooth speaker. That was loud enough for me to really carry on a phone call and keep doing things with my arm so that's. What this is it's, just a bluetooth speaker, there's, no watch in it it's a wearable and usb charging. You can play and reverse and mess around with your music and, of course, you can make and receive phone calls with a good loud speaker. I don't even have a model number on it. I don't even think i bought it in 2020.
I just found it. I figured i'd show it to you guys. So, if you've been really looking hard to get a nice uh watch that you can use for making and receiving phone calls – and you just haven't been happy with how loud they are pick up. Something like this. For 15 bucks that might do it for you. What else have i got here this little goodie here? This is a z6 and um it's, a an adventurer's watch, you put in a sim card here. It can give you location data and best of all it can set that whole thing up for a friend or partner to monitor wherever you are. It also has built in camera capability that can go in and instantly set up for either doing pictures or videos and those can be sent um with the sim card and data to uh the tethered phone shut down slide down to switched cameras – oh okay, so you Can get a front? Oh hi, everybody! This is mr ticks. You can get a front facing camera or or you can do the long distance, one from the back it's a sweet, little specialty watch for the adventurer hiker that one's available and then wellness we've got a couple of little things that don't even look like watches and They'Re not what is this it's a chest, strap from the company? Well, you go well you dot com! Look at all these things! You put this on a chest, strap and wear it, and it will give you ecg readings.
In fact, you can just touch it. It activates it vibrates and when you're tethered to the phone, you see your live ecg chart on here, your heart rate, all that stuff is there what's it look like well. This is another! Well, you product right here that is uh the pulse bit ex and i can show you right away by using this mode here, to the palm of my hand, touch the blades touch it here and folks. There is mr ticks live, ecg chart coming through and, of course, this can be recorded and exported and sent to your doctor and whatnot it's, giving you a 30 second chart and in the lower right hand corner you can see it just came up with the actual Heart rate, as well, derived from the electronic signal, so lots of specialty products for the upcoming holidays, we've got android, watches health, fitness communications, you name it they're all available and we've done, reviews of them all here at smartwatch ticks so just head on over to smartwatchticks.com. Look for the little magnifying glass put in whatever term you want that'll search through all of our videos. When you watch a video check, the uh show notes associated with that video, because a link for buying the product that you're looking at will be found in there and usually with a discount coupon as well. There you go 2020 overall, summary of smart watches and other things.
