Are You a Smartwatch Expert?

The smartwatch is a wearable computer in the form of a watch with a local touchscreen interface and an associated smartphone app for management and telemetry.

Modern smartwatches have general functionality closer to smartphones, including mobile apps, a mobile operating system, and WiFi/Bluetooth connectivity.

Smartwatches can function as portable media players, with FM radio and playback of digital audio and video files via a Bluetooth headset.

Most smartwatches have an electronic visual display, either backlit LCD or OLED, and are powered by a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

Peripheral devices may include digital cameras, thermometers, accelerometers, pedometers, heart rate monitors, altimeters, barometers, compasses, GPS receivers, tiny speakers, and microSD cards.

Software may include digital maps, schedulers and personal organizers, calculators, and various kinds of watch faces.

Smartwatches may collect information from internal or external sensors and may control or retrieve data from other instruments or computers.

The first digital watch, the Pulsar, was introduced in 1972 by Hamilton Watch Company.

The first smartwatch with graphics display and many 3rd party applications was the Ruputer, introduced in Japan in 1998.

Pebble was a smartwatch that raised $10.3 million on Kickstarter and had a battery that lasted seven days.

The Android Wear platform was introduced in 2014, and many new smartwatches were released by various companies, including LG, Samsung, and Motorola.A Brief History of Smartwatches

• Samsung's Gear S smartwatch was launched in late August 2014 with a curved Super AMOLED display and built-in 3G modem.
• Sony announced the third generation of its smartwatch series, the Sony Smartwatch 3 powered by Android Wear.
• Apple announced its first smartwatch on 9 September 2014 called the Apple Watch, which began shipping on 24 April 2015.
• Microsoft announced the Microsoft Band, a smart fitness tracker and the company's first venture into wrist-worn devices since SPOT (Smart Personal Objects Technology) a decade earlier.
• Samsung unveiled the Samsung Gear S2 in October 2015, featuring a rotating bezel for ease of use, and an IP68 rating for water resistance up to 1.5 meters deep in 30 minutes.
• Razer released the Nabu Watch, a dual-screen smartwatch, at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show.
• Luxury watchmaker TAG Heuer released TAG Heuer Connected, a smartwatch powered by Android Wear.
• Samsung unveiled the Samsung Gear S3 smartwatch in August 2016 with higher specifications, with at least two models: the Samsung Gear S3 Classic and the LTE version Samsung Gear S3 Frontier.
• The top smartwatches that debuted at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show included the Casio WSD-F20, Misfit Wearables Vapor and the Garmin Fenix 5 series.
• Apple released their Apple Watch Series 3 model on 22 September 2017, offering built-in LTE cellular connectivity.
• In 2018, Samsung introduced the Samsung Galaxy Watch series, and Apple introduced a redesigned Apple Watch Series 4 with a larger display and an EKG feature.
• In September 2018, Qualcomm introduced its Snapdragon 3100 chip, a successor to the Wear 2100, with greater power efficiency and a separate low power core.
• In 2020, the United States Food and Drug Administration granted marketing approval for an Apple Watch app called NightWare, which aims to improve sleep for people suffering from PTSD-related nightmares.
• Global smartwatch shipments counted 14 million in the third quarter of 2019, with Apple as the market leader, followed by Samsung, Imoo, Fitbit, Amazfit, Huawei, Fossil, and Garmin.