For several years, there is an ongoing competition between smartwatches and smart bands, but nobody expected at any moment for the smartwatches to win.
The wrist-wear family includes two types of devices. The first, entitled smart bands, are more accessible, simplistic in terms of functionality and while many of them don’t show the exact time, they do a very good job when it comes to tracking your movement. The second category includes the smartwatches which in most cases are much smarter, displays notifications on your phone, sometimes they could be used to answer phone calls and the clock function isn’t missing in any way. On the other hand, the smartwatches are significantly more expensive and might not be so accurate when it comes to tracking your movement during the day or sleep cycles during the night.
The lower the smartwatches price gets, the more irrelevant the smartband category becomes, at least, this is the conclusion to the latest study published by Gartner. So, we find that it’s only a matter of time before the smartwatches will become affordable to everyone, managing to overcome smart bands in sold units. It’s expected that in 2017 we’ll see an increase of 18.4% in this market, reflected in earnings of 28.7 billion. Of this amount, 11,5 billion will be derived from smartwatches.
If the trend continues, it shouldn’t take more than two years before smartwatches will exceed smart bracelets in users preferences. For this transition to occur without any compromises, when it comes to tracking your movement and calories lost, the best would be that the new products come from companies that have already managed to put its imprint on smart bands. From one point of view, Fitbit Surge is such a device that includes the most important features of both spectrums of activity.