The 10 Best Smartwatches and Wearables of 2016

It’s been a strange year for wearables. Smartwatches are in rough shape and yet the category of wearables, which we’ve deemed to be any sort of technology you can strap to your body, was invigorated thanks to the dawn of virtual reality. Though we’d seen VR in years past, 2016 was when the big guns came to play. Both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive hit the market this spring, giving us a taste of the future. Each gives a different take on the platform and comes with its own set of benefits and drawbacks, but both deliver a heap of excitement for what they could offer years from now.
Beyond VR, though, 2016 was light on anticipation for wearables. It’s not that there weren’t a slew of devices that caught our eye, it’s that most of them were iterations on ideas we’ve already seen. There was very little true innovation in this space this year, which makes it a curious one moving forward. Ten years from now, wearable technology could be the most important category in consumer electronics, or it could be dead.
For now, there’s still life left in the gadgets we strap to our wrists, or place on our heads, and 2016 delivered a lot of interesting ones.
Here are the 10 best:
10. Misfit RayMisfit has been an intriguing name in the fitness tracker world for years with the Shine, a device that resists the design norms of the form factor. With the Ray, the company offers a band that is both more typical and atypical to other fitness trackers. It is clearly a band, like most devices in the category, but it is unapologetically fashion first and the best example of “incognito” design that companies like Jawbone have attempted in the past. It blends easily with other fashion accessories, thus not drawing unwanted attention to itself, while still offering the usual slate of features like step, calorie and sleep tracking. Add in a swimproof construction and replaceable batteries that can last up to six months and the Ray is a great option for those yet to jump on the fitness tracker bandwagon.
9. Samsung Gear Fit 2On the opposite end of the spectrum to the Ray is Samsung’s Gear Fit 2. This is a device that is loudly and proudly a fitness tracker. There is no hiding it on your wrist thanks to the 1.5-inch Super AMOLED display, which offers deep blacks and punchy colors. It’s the best display on any fitness band; ergonomic thanks to its gentle curve, incredibly responsive and boosted by well-thought-out and intuitive software. The Gear Fit 2 also has excellent workout support, heart rate monitoring and support for notifications with the ability to take action on select ones (like SMS messages). Battery life could certainly be better, and it’s undeniably a device for the workout aficionado, but all considered it offers one of the best wearable experiences of the year.
8. Garmin Vivosmart HR+Given Fitbit’s substantial lead in the area of fitness technology, it can be hard for other companies to entice users, especially when a lot of their friends may already be attached to the Fitbit ecosystem. Garmin is one of those companies that, while it doesn’t have the same pull as Fitbit, is quietly delivering some of the best fitness-focused wearables on the market. The Vivosmart HR+ is perhaps Garmin’s best ever tracker, with exceptional activity monitoring and great features for runners. It offers built-in GPS for accurate run tracking, an element usually relegated to chunkier sport and smartwatches, plus six day battery life, water resistance up to 50 meters and smart notifications. It’s a full-featured option that’s especially great for runners and doesn’t come with the bulk of a dedicated watch.
7. PlayStation VRThis was the year VR fully materialized. No longer allocated to the smartphone accessory section of the market, in 2016 virtual reality reached for bigger and better things. Of all its potential uses, VR has been earmarked for gaming from the start and the three biggest headsets of the year, the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Playstation VR all focused on that medium. Though not as powerful as its counterparts, PS VR offers superior comfort and an accessibility only matched by mobile rigs. If you add the entire package together, Sony’s platform is a $800-900 commitment, a number that fluctuates depending on if you include the Move controllers, PlayStation Camera and opt for a PS4 Pro or standard model.
Even at that price, it’s less overall than the total price of the Rift or Vive (in which you have to factor a high performance gaming PC) and there’s one huge fact that remains: 50 million PS4s have been sold. And PS VR works with all of them. Yes, it may be technologically inferior to what Oculus and HTC offer, but it’s by far the most accessible, serious gaming VR headset on the market.