Fitness Tracker Vs. Smartwatch What Is Best For You?

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Personal/Fitness Training Blog

Both smartwatches and fitness trackers can assist you with staying connected, tracking your everyday activities as well as monitoring your progress towards fitness goals. However, there are differences between the two kinds of devices. This means that you’ll need to decide which features are the most important to you.

Normally, fitness trackers are more focused on health and activity monitoring as opposed to smart notifications. Their smaller screens aren’t as favourable to reading and responding to messages as the larger screens on watches.  Some smartwatches are aimed at fashion-conscious people who also would like to keep fit people who mostly want an attractive watch with good smart features as well as a modicum of fitness features.

Some are aimed just at fitness enthusiasts who would like plenty of sensors for specialist exercise tracking.  However there are plenty which straddle both camps, providing looks, sophisticated health features, advanced smart features as well as detailed sports tracking.

What Is A Fitness Tracker?

Trackers are simpler devices which are intended mainly for fundamental physical monitoring. They don’t work with the third-party apps as smartwatches do. However, they often don’t cost as much, either.

Fitbit’s fitness tracker offerings boil down to merely a handful of models. These incorporate the Inspire 2, one of our top-rated options, in addition to the new Charge 5, which is a bit larger and more expensive and comes with a colour display and other smartwatch-like features.

In addition, there’s the Fitbit Luxe, a sleek and fashionable model which offers stress management tools.

A Fitness Tracker Tracks All Of Your Everyday Activity

Did you walk from the garden and back into the house? Your fitness tracker will count those steps. Climbed up 10 flights of stairs in order to get to work? A fitness tracker will track your all-day activity. This means your steps, distance, elevation, and the calories which you burned during that activity.

When you have a fitness tracker with advanced features you’ll have the ability to choose custom workout profiles such as hiking, HIIT training as well as weight training and track those. Depending on which fitness tracker you select you may be able to track swimming too, and some trackers offer multi-sport tracking if you do different sports during your daily workout.

Many different types of fitness trackers will also track your sleep, so you can wear it all night and see how many hours of REM and light sleep you’re getting.

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What Is A Smartwatch?

Yes, a smartwatch will cost you a bit more as opposed to a fitness tracker. However in many cases you’re buying a lot of extra functionality. And for what it’s worth, smartwatches dropped considerably in price in recent years.

On the other side, the performance as well as features of Fitbit’s poshest model don’t come close to duplicating those of the top-rated Apple Watch (which costs roughly twice as much). Although you are able read messages and download an expanding population of third-party apps, you aren’t able to make or take calls from any of Fitbit’s watches. And the Fitbit store has just a fraction of the apps which Apple and Google offer.

Smartwatches Keep You Connected Via Your Favourite Operating System

Just like you choose an Android or Apple phone, you can choose a smartwatch that runs on the Android or Apple operating system. The Apple Watch is the only smartwatch which runs the watchOS operating system, but there are many different types of Android smartwatch that run Google’s Wear OS.

While you don’t have to stick to the same type of operating system your phone runs, you could find some smartwatches have features which only work when paired with a compatible phone. For instance, some smartwatches will only let you answer calls if you have a phone with a similar operating system.

If you choose a Wear OS watch you should be able to load apps on it that run independently of your phone. That means you can still track your fitness, but you can leave your phone at home.

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