I held a smartwatch 'beauty pageant.' The winners and losers will surprise you

Over the holidays, I held a smartwatch beauty pageant with my family. On Christmas, I drove to my parents' house with a plastic Safeway bag carrying 13 smartwatches and asked my bemused relatives if they wanted to help me with an article. Most of them had never worn a smartwatch, which made them perfect for my little experiment.

I poured out a messy pile of Android watches, fitness watches, and an Apple Watch onto my mom's festive tablecloth. Then I told each judge to place them in a row, with the "prettiest or coolest" watches on the left and the "ugliest or most boring" on the right, focusing on which devices they'd "actually want to wear."

All told, I got 21 participants across generations, ranging from my 80-year-old great-aunt to my teenage nephews and niece. After each vote, I'd mix the watches back into a pile so that the previous person's choices wouldn't influence their decision.

Why did I rope my relatives into this little experiment? Even though I try to make my smartwatch reviews as objective as possible, focusing on battery life, performance, and fitness accuracy, a lot of people will choose a watch solely based on looks, comfort, and vibes. And I think that can be a blind spot for me.

I'm happy wearing bulky, sporty watches or heavier models to get better battery life, and I think tech reviewers have gotten used to smartwatches' thick, machine-cut look. But when my mother told me that my Garmin watch looked like a "spaceship on my wrist," it got me thinking that I should try and recalibrate my mental image of a good-looking watch. Hence, the smartwatch beauty pageant!

CES 2025 kept me busy after the break, but I finally got to tally up the votes this week. And I bet you'll be as surprised by the results of my smartwatch beauty pageant as I was!

How I chose and prepped the 'contestants'

I chose 13 smartwatches for my test: the Amazfit Cheetah Pro, Apple Watch Ultra 2, Coros Pace Pro, Fitbit Charge 6, Fitbit Sense, Garmin Fenix 8, Garmin Instinct 2X Solar, Google Pixel Watch 3, OnePlus Watch 2R, Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, Galaxy Watch 6 Classic, Galaxy Watch Ultra, and Withings ScanWatch 2.

I tried to have a fair split between "sporty" and "mainstream" watches, as well as expensive and affordable ones. I made a point of including the Charge 6 and Sense to see how a fitness band or a generic-looking squircle would compare in people's minds to fancier or traditional rounded smartwatch designs.

I wasn't sure whether to include the hybrid ScanWatch 2, as it seemed too different from the rest with its classic look, but I was curious how much non-techy people would care about an old-school impression or if it would feel too old-fashioned for the Gen Zers.

While I had more smartwatches I considered including, I didn't want to overwhelm my family with too many choices. They came to party and socialize, not do an unpaid survey.

I chose not to charge my smartwatches before the test; would you want to spend Christmas morning charging watches? I had a justification for it: I wanted people to focus on the watches' physical designs, and I thought brighter displays or prettier watch faces might subconsciously sway their votes. Still, you might disagree with the decision since it's hard to judge how a smartwatch looks without the display turning on.

Finally, I told my relatives to try and ignore the color of the smartwatch bands when the first couple told me they hated the orange bands on the Fitbit Charge 6 and Galaxy Watch Ultra. I assured them that these straps could come in different colors.

The results of my smartwatch beauty pageant

The table above shows how many votes each smartwatch received from 1st to 13th place. The table below shows the total points, with the contestants ranked from most to least points. I gave a proportional amount of points for each vote: First place is worth 13 points, second place 12 points, and so on, down to one point for 13th place.

As you can see, the Withings ScanWatch 2 crushed the competition, somewhat predictably. Many family members didn't like what most of the smartwatches looked like and told me that the hybrid watch might be the only one they'd seriously consider wearing.

But you might be somewhat surprised to see the budget OnePlus Watch 2R come in second. Everyone seemed to love its distinct scale bezel and flat look, preferring its rounded aluminum case to the fancier titanium of many rival watches. Considering the ScanWatch 2 is barely a smartwatch with its tiny OLED display, you could call the Watch 2R the real winner of the pageant.

Almost no one liked the Garmin Instinct 2X Solar, the last-place pick, but I fully expected that. It's a massive, niche watch for outdoorsmen. One person told me it looked like something Master Chief would wear and that she expected Cortana to hop out of it.

What surprised me more is how little people cared for the three most expensive smartwatches: the Garmin Fenix 8 (7th), Apple Watch Ultra 2 (8th), and Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra (12th). They all lost to the Fitbit Sense (6th), which one family member called "so generic-looking that it makes me mad." The Sense looked light enough that my female family members, in particular, thought it would be the most comfortable and "ordinary."

That's a pretty big knock against all the tech reviewers like myself who gave these flagship watches glowing reviews and praised their unique designs. People didn't mind the Fenix 8 because it was flat and "normal-looking," but it was simply too big for a lot of them, and they didn't like how many buttons it had. As for Apple and Samsung, their hard-edged, square-ish looks made them look both artificial and "too massive."

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Samsung's older smartwatches did better; the Galaxy Watch 6 Classic (4th) divided the voters, with some loving its unique rotating bezel and others finding that it made the watch too big. The Galaxy Watch 5 Pro (3rd), which Samsung has all but abandoned, captivated people with the strength of its unique sunken bezel and metallic look.

Honestly, I can't discount how much people liked the Pro simply because of its shining silver in a sea of black watches. But the white Coros Pace Pro (10th) and titanium-bezel Amazfit Cheetah Pro (11th) discount that theory a bit. Their brightness only highlighted how "cheap" and "unattractive" they looked, with only a few of my more active relatives appreciating the Pace Pro's lightness for workouts.

The most polarizing candidate was the Pixel Watch 3 (5th). It was ranked top-four for nearly half of the voters, with three first-place votes from family members who loved its rounded, relatively light look. But other voters had visceral reactions to it looking "like nothing," like a "creepy water drop," or "like a naked chicken breast without any seasoning." My family has a unique way with words.

What I learned from my smartwatch beauty pageant

21 people is a decent focus group, but this test was hardly definitive or properly controlled. In a perfect world, I'd have ensured each watch case and strap was the same color, that the displays were active, and that people weren't peeking at other people's votes out of interest before they voted themselves.

Still, I feel like I learned some lessons from my experiment:

1. Size matters. Most people didn't like the tiny Fitbit Charge 6, but they also cared more about a comfortable fit and thin case than a large display.
2. People don't care if a big watch is proportionally light thanks to titanium; they'd rather it be compact and won't notice if it's aluminum.
3. They cared much more about how the watch looked from the top-down (what they'd see) than from the side (what others would see), which makes the bezel (or lack thereof) extremely important.

This test reminded me why Apple Watches outsell every other brand, beyond name recognition and iPhone dominance. They're thin and petite and safe-looking, and they don't invite unflattering comparisons to non-smart or hybrid watches like rounded smartwatches do.

Android smartwatches can't help but look "too big" to people outside of the tech space, though the 40mm Galaxy Watch 7 or 41mm Pixel Watch 3 might escape that label. So even though I prioritize larger displays and batteries and so on, I need to remember when reviewing smartwatches that a lot of people might see my positives as negatives.