Keeping it real simple

So if the strategy of building mini Android smartphones for your wrist is not yet mature, what’s the best alternative solution? A great many Kickstarter projects have tried and failed to answer that question, but one has succeeded: the Pebble.

The Pebble owes its success to a very simple idea: take everything useful that other smartwatches do, do it as cheaply as possible, and discard all the rest. That means no color screen, no fancy cameras, microphones, or aluminum construction; just the pure, frugal expression of a notification station on your wrist. If being a second screen to your phone is the best advantage that smartwatches currently enjoy over their conventional counterparts, they might as well perform that task as efficiently as possible. The Pebble is cheaper, lighter, and longer-lasting than any of the foregoing devices, and it comes with the built-in satisfaction that you’re supporting a small startup company. Being compatible with iPhones as well as Android devices did no harm to its chances of success, either.

The Pebble wins because of, not despite, its simplicity

More importantly, what the Pebble represents is the fundamental hardware limitation that all the best-laid smartphone plans come up against. You want to have a versatile, do-it-all smartphone replacement on your wrist, but there’s no feasible solution to achieve that goal. The moment you put in a 3G radio, you sacrifice a great deal of battery life and internal space, while a color screen and a reasonably fast processor consign you to a daily charging regimen. Basically, you end up with the Galaxy Gear. Or the LG GD910 watchphone. So, until we see new breakthroughs in battery technology, display energy efficiency, or as ARM’s Ian Drew puts it, "chips that don’t consume power," anything more ambitious than a Pebble just doesn’t seem worth pursuing.

Smarter fitness

The dark horse in this race for preeminence on your wrist is a product category that’s actually been around for a while. Wearable fitness trackers have been rapidly evolving over the past couple of years and their final destination doesn’t seem terribly different from that of a useful smartwatch. You get something that keeps the time and does a few other useful things besides — it’s just that with these devices you get a lot more smartphone independence and a lot less of the din of your social media stream. Some might consider both those things to be advantageous.

Needless to say, you won’t be checking your Twitter feed on a fitness-focused wristband. What you will be doing, however, is developing a steady addiction to accomplishing exercise-based goals. Whereas others on this list might pay only lip service to health tracking, Fitbit and Nike have entire software suites dedicated to the cause. They offer communities of fellow users to interact with and measure yourself against, plus — that ultimate gateway drug — achievement badges. The Force is the first wristband from Fitbit that will tell you the time as well as quantifying your efforts to live the good life, qualifying it for consideration as a smartwatch.

No smartphone required

The strength of both Fitbit and Nike’s proposition is the ecosystem they’ve each built up around their hardware. Fundamentally, they’re offering you something you can’t get from your phone or just a random web search — they’re giving meaning and context to the metrics of your routine, maybe even boring, activities. This gamification may be interpreted as a cheap ploy, but the many happy users of Fitbits and FuelBands show that it’s providing real value to regular humans’ lives.

As if to underscore the vitality of this market segment, Adidas has just announced its own take on the smart fitness watch in the shape of the miCoach Smart Run. Coming next month, this $399 run tracker includes GPS, heart rate monitoring, a media player, a pedometer, and a color touchscreen. Like Adidas’ competitors, it works to plug you into the company’s web-based miCoach training platform, eschewing smartphone syncing altogether.