The Best Smartwatches, According to the Reviews

The phone in your pocket has already made most of this decision. An Apple Watch pairs with an iPhone and nothing else; a Galaxy Watch runs Wear OS and will not talk to an iPhone properly. Before any score matters, that constraint removes roughly two-thirds of the market for you, which is why this page is organised by phone rather than by rank.

Within what is left, the finding is the price. The $169.99 Amazfit Active 3 Premium averages 9.0 — exactly what the $799 Apple Watch Ultra 3 averages from three published outlet scores each. It is not the better watch, and the section below says plainly what you give up. But a watch costing less than a quarter as much drawing level on averaged score is the single starkest example of that gap we have found in any category.

The three, at a glance

	Review consensus	Price	Works with	The catch
Apple Watch Ultra 3	9.0 — no disagreement at all	$799	iPhone only	Costly, and physically big
Amazfit Active 3 Premium	9.0 — widest spread here	$169.99	Either phone	Barely any smart features
Samsung Galaxy Watch 8	8.7 — one outlet cooler	—	Android only	Battery life, universally
Amazfit Active 2	8.7 — genuinely contested	$99	Either phone	The older, thinner version

Consensus averages three published scores per watch, normalised to ten. The “best at” column is ours, read off what those reviewers found — none of them ranked these three against each other.

The one that agreed with itself

Something worth pausing on: all three outlets scoring the Apple Watch Ultra 3 landed on exactly 9.0 once normalised. TechRadar’s 4.5, Tom’s Guide’s 4.5 and Digital Trends’ 9 out of 10 are the same verdict expressed three ways.

That is rarer than it sounds. Across the 77 outlet scores we have published, the median gap between the harshest and kindest outlet on the same product is 1.5 points, and nearly half of all products span two or more. A spread of zero means the reviewers were not arguing about what this watch is — only about whether you need it. Our piece on where the reviewers disagree sets out that baseline in full.

Questions the search data says people are actually asking

Should I wait for the next Apple Watch? Searches for upcoming Apple releases run high all year, and the honest answer is that there is always another one. Apple’s cadence is annual and autumn-weighted, so buying in late autumn generally gets you the newest model; buying in summer generally does not. If you are reading this in the run-up to the holidays, waiting buys you very little.

Why the Ultra 3 and not the Series 11? The Series 11 is the mainstream Apple Watch and the one most people should probably buy — it is smaller, cheaper and does most of the same things. It is not on this page for a mechanical reason: we could not find three published numeric scores for it from named outlets, and three is our threshold. That is a gap in our evidence, not a mark against the watch.

Where is Garmin? Missing, and it is the clearest example of how this method can fail. Garmin sells the Venu, Forerunner, Fenix and Instinct lines simultaneously, each in several variants, so reviews scatter across a dozen models rather than concentrating on one. No single Garmin model reached three published scores, so none could qualify — which says something about Garmin’s product strategy and nothing about Garmin’s watches. If you run seriously, look at Garmin anyway.

Can I change the watch face? Yes, on all three, and it is one of the most-searched things about smartwatches — more searched than most specifications. All three ship a face gallery; Apple and Samsung both allow third-party faces through their app stores, Amazfit through its own. It is not a differentiator between these watches, which is why it is here rather than in the table.

Samsung has already replaced the Galaxy Watch 8 — and that is an argument for buying it

The Galaxy Watch 9 went on sale in the US on 7 August 2026, three weeks before this was written. It is not our pick, and the reason is not that we missed it.

At both outlets that have scored the Watch 8 and the Watch 9, the newer watch scored lower. Trusted Reviews went from four and a half out of five to four; Tom’s Guide from four to three and three-quarters, under a headline saying the new health tools impress but that does not mean you should upgrade.

The comparisons explain why. Same design, same display, the same sensor list and nearly identical battery life — the changes are a Qualcomm chip in place of Samsung’s own, a slightly larger cell, and a new interface. Digital Trends recorded the price going the other way: the Watch 9 starts at $380 against the Watch 8’s $349 at launch, a $30 rise for a modest refresh.

It also does not qualify here yet on its own terms. Only two outlets have published a numeric score for it, and three is our threshold — so it will appear on this page when a third does, and not before.

What that means if you are buying now: the previous-generation watch is the one the reviewers rate more highly, and it is the one that gets discounted while the new model holds its price. That is an unusually clean case for buying last year’s model, and it is the sort of thing an averaged score hides unless somebody looks.

We were a generation behind, and the correction improves the page

This shortlist previously led on the $99 Amazfit Active 2. Amazfit had already replaced it with the Active 3 Premium, and we had not noticed — found during a sweep of every pick on this site for a newer model. The correction is here rather than applied silently.

The successor is not a like-for-like replacement, which is why both remain. There is no base Active 3 — Premium is the entire range — so the step up is $169.99 against the Active 2’s $99, and it buys sapphire glass, NFC payments and running metrics like stride length and ground contact. It also scores higher: 9.0 against 8.7, from the same three outlets.

That makes the honest advice a fork rather than a swap. If a hundred dollars is the ceiling, the Active 2 is still the watch; if it is not, the Active 3 Premium is a materially better one for seventy dollars more, and it draws level with a watch costing four and a half times as much.

What actually decides it, once the phone has decided most of it

• Do you charge nightly, or do you resent charging? This is the real dividing line. The Amazfit runs for days; the Galaxy Watch does not, and every outlet said so. Battery is where cheap watches now beat expensive ones outright.
• Do you want apps on your wrist, or measurements? watchOS and Wear OS have ecosystems. Amazfit does not, and pretending otherwise is where a cheap watch disappoints people.
• Is the health data for interest or for training? For steps and sleep, all three are fine. For structured training, the Garmin absence above matters more than anything in our table.
• Wrist size, honestly. The Ultra is large. No score on this page can tell you it will look absurd on you, and returning a watch is more annoying than returning most things.

If you are choosing a first watch and have no strong feeling about any of the above, the Amazfit is the low-risk answer: it costs least, lasts longest between charges, and works whichever phone you own.