Ask Paul: Friday, December 10 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Let’s kick off the weekend a bit early with another great set of reader questions.
Wearables
crunchyfrog asks:

I know that you regularly review laptops and phones and occasionally wearables, however with things starting to heat up in the WearOS category now that Samsung has apparently breathed new life into the non-Apple side of this, will you be considering spending more time in reviewing these devices?

This is interesting timing. Short answer, yes. Long answer, requires a bit of background.

I’ve always been interested in wearables, starting (and continuing) with fitness trackers and, more recently, smartwatches. And I’ve owned probably 12-20 wearables over time, I’ve lost track and forgotten some of them. Many, many Fitbits, of course, each Microsoft Band, the Nike Fuel Band, several Samsung, Huawei, Motorola, and other Google- and Tizen-based wearables and watches and … more, I really can’t even remember. Oh, right. Apple Watch as well. And Amazon Halo last year.

If you think about devices I do review regularly, like laptops and smartphones, the big thing is that I at least have relationships with some of these companies. So I am regularly offered review devices from laptop companies like HP and Lenovo especially, and then Acer and Dell less often, and then this past year, an interesting mix of companies I don’t usually work with. (That will make some end-of-year review at some point, it was notable.) In the smartphone space, I got most Windows phones back in the day, and I get OnePlus handsets regularly. I used to get Huawei handsets, and wish I still did, and I occasionally but not always get other devices, like the random Samsung. But mostly I have to buy those myself. I routinely bought an iPhone most years either because I was using them or, more recently, because they’re too important to ignore.

With wearables, the only company I consistently heard from, briefly while they still made them, was Microsoft. I did get random wearables for review from Huawei, Samsung, and maybe a few others. But it was always sporadic. And from a personal basis, I was really using some wearable all the time for years. As such, I was less inclined to keep swapping them out, let alone switching ecosystems, because I wanted that data to be consistent over time. Things like Google Fit are interesting because they can act as a central repository for data from multiple devices/ecosystems, but not all of them. But I was really using the devices, so it was a big deal to switch.

Mostly I’ve stuck with Fitbit. And I literally interact with this thing every single day, sync in the morning to check on my resting heart rate, sleep score, and fitness readiness score. Discuss these things with my wife, who does the same. And then track walks automatically and, at the gym, cardio and weights manually. And the days turn into weeks turn into months turn into years… and you stop thinking about switching.

Except tha...

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