Emporio Armani Men's Touchscreen Connected Smartwatch

Product Information

Huawei has said its new version of HarmonyOS operating system will be ready for development use on smartphones beginning in December, and expects phones with the new software to come in 2021. Beyond this, HarmonyOS will be made available to other hardware makers for use on non-Huawei devices. Is it a convincing alternative to the best smartwatches currently available? We've been putting the Emporio Armani Smartwatch 3 to the test to find out. This isn’t a fitness watch, despite some of the features, and won’t be anyone’s first choice to wear at the gym, but leaving the heart rate sensor running is a good way to judge overall fitness, even if you’re going about your daily business. The Emporio Armani Connected hybrid smartwatch combines the dynamic styling of Emporio Armani and the benefits of today’s wearable technology. Wirelessly syncing to your mobile device, this timepiece is always accurate, automatically converting time zone as you travel.

We were hoping for a better performance than with the Emporio Armani Connected 2018, which refused to work, but, exhaustingly, the same issue occurred here. Each of the Fossil Group's partners offers a unique take on the modern smartwatch, and Armani appears to have settled into a rhythm with its third iteration. This watch is compatible with IOS and Android both versions. A customizable dial is available which means you can always match your look.

Wear OS gets a smart new suit

The Emporio Armani Smartwatch 3 isn't the first Wear OS watch to have this issue recently, but it is an expensive one to have such a critical fitness related flaw. However, it's possible this is just a bug, as the watch supposedly has GPS built in.

The Moto Watch 100 is a cheap Motorola-branded watch by CE Brands that's had some of its specifications leak earlier. As far as hardware goes, it will be quite standard, should the rumors pan out. It'll be a light watch at 29 grams, with a 355mAh battery and support for Bluetooth 5.0. All the old familiar sensors, from accelerometers to gyroscopes, are there, and it'll be a fitness-focused watch. What is interesting about this watch is the alleged choice of operating system. Rather than adopting Google's Wear OS as expected, the Motorola Watch 100 will, according to Blass, run an all-new Moto Watch OS. Notifications are still a lengthy list without much categorization, but it’s better than it used to be in Android Wear 1.0. The Google Play Store is accessible in version 2.0, and there’s a reasonable amount of apps available for your smartwatch. It’s easy to use on the watch so it you are looking for an app, it’s not a nightmare, but it’s still just a long list of mediocre apps to scroll through. Android Wear (and wearables in general) work best with notifications, calendar access, navigation, and increasingly, music. Load music onto the watch, connect a pair of Bluetooth headphones, and you’ve got a convenient music player that’s ideal for workouts. The Google Play Music app is well designed, with large, easy-to-tap buttons. Just like anything with the name Armani attached to it, wearing the Emporio Armani Connected smartwatch is about the way it makes you feel, and not what it actually does. Having a “bare essentials” feature list means the tech-smarts don’t overshadow the sophisticated style. Armani does not install any superfluous apps, adding only a Saved Looks app to store modified watch faces. While we don’t want pointless extra apps, something to distinguish the AX Connected from the other fashion smartwatches out there would be nice. It all feels a little half-hearted, like Armani Exchange couldn’t be bothered to personalize the watch. Andy Boxall/Digital Trends All this leads to the overriding feeling that, you know, maybe we don't need a separate app for Assistant, Wear OS and Fit.

There are two aspects of the Emporio Armani Connected that affect its lifetime: The battery and the software. The battery will inevitably lose its ability to hold a charge, but that shouldn’t happen for at least two years, and by that time, Google and Armani may stop sending the watch software updates. However, the watch will continue to work beyond this time. No specific water resistance level is given, so we’d suggest not showering with it on. If you opt for one of the more traditional watch faces, then enable the always-on display (where the time is shown all day, instead of the screen going blank after a few seconds) the Connected looks like a regular watch at first glance. As for the display, the Armani Exchange Connected uses a circular 1.2-inch AMOLED panel with a resolution of 380 x 390 and a pixel density of 328 pixels per inch. The screen is visible in most circumstances when its brightness level is left to automatic, but sometimes we struggled to read it in bright sunlight. The smartwatch is the inevitable place where fashion and technology intersects. More fashion brands are releasing smartwatches because they know that, if they manage to get it right, this is a highly lucrative area for them.