Emporio Armani Men's Touchscreen Connected Smartwatch

Product Information

Google Fit is great, and it’s easy to track workouts with the pre-made settings, and it all transfers seamlessly to Fit on your phone. It was standing in a queue of people in a cafe, right after I checked a notification, that things came into focus. The Armani Exchange smartwatch is made from stainless steel and available in silver, gold, black, or blue. Using an iPhone for this review (admittedly not as good as pairing to an Android device, but why is that even still an issue in 2019?

A smartwatch can look as good as the Armani Smartwatch 3, but it's generally only as good as the operating system backing it up. It doesn’t run Android Wear or have a touchscreen; but the style is fantastic, and it performs simple features like delivering notifications without any fuss. Android Wear is the wearable operating system from Google, and this year the company introduced version 2.

Right in front of me, someone was wearing a Fitbit Blaze, which is easily one of the most unattractive things you can put on your wrist. As well as reviewing dash cams for TechRadar, he also has bylines at Wired, T3, Forbes, Stuff, The Independent, SlashGear and Grand Designs Magazine, among others. It’s very sensitive, so a gentle touch is required if you don’t want to go zipping through any menus at an incredible pace. 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 microphone doesn’t need to be right next to your mouth to pick up voices, but still struggles with noisy environments. It all feels a little half-hearted, like Armani Exchange couldn’t be bothered to personalize the watch. The Armani Exchange Connected is a master of many trades, by looking as at home in the gym as it does in the boardroom. We had no trouble pairing the two, but there are fewer features available when the watch is used with an iPhone.For reference, that's just slightly cheaper than the latest Apple Watch, and around more expensive than the Apple Watch Series 3. There’s also Smart Replies, which uses on-device machine learning to offer up short, contextually-relevant phrases you can quickly use in a conversation. Android Wear is designed to work with Google’s Android mobile OS, and it connected to various smartphones without a problem. All the old familiar sensors, from accelerometers to gyroscopes, are there, and it'll be a fitness-focused watch. And Emporio Armani is also out-pricing the excellent Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 and the Fossil Gen 5.

Emporio Armani Connected syncs your hybrid smartwatch and phone so you can customize filtered notifications, monitor daily activity, control your phone’s music and more.The middle one is the aforementioned rotating crown, which is handy for quickly digging into the features of Wear OS. All this leads to the overriding feeling that, you know, maybe we don't need a separate app for Assistant, Wear OS and Fit. Just a few years ago, wearing a smartwatch of this size drew far too much attention to itself, and not always in a positive manner. Now a firm fixture in the Fossil Group's annual Wear OS launch bonanza, Emporio Armani is back with the third smartwatch from its Connected range. The GPS issues are unforgivable, the addition of the speaker is minor and these detract from the new battery modes, design tweaks and solid heart rate accuracy.

Because the AX Connected doesn’t do anything specific, and doesn’t manage to effectively separate itself from the competition, there isn’t a compelling reason to splash out on one. Your expectations will be high that Armani’s first foray into the world of proper smartwatches (it previously launched a line of hybrid offerings) will be as fitting as its haute couture, and for good reason - this is a fashion brand that’s precious over its label, so it’s to be expected that it wouldn’t put its name to any old piece of gadgetry.

Wear OS switches the always-on screen off by default, along with background heart rate tracking, to help mitigate the issue, but this does limit the watch’s usefulness. While last year's model slightly over-reported average heart rate, this time around it was always within 1-2 bpm, or, as above, right in line with the Versa. If you're keen about logos though, there's a tiny one on the crown and another on the back of the watch. You could argue the more sporty vibe should have been present in the 2018 model – and you'd probably be right – but let's just celebrate the fact it's here now, in what is essentially the Emporio Armani Smartwatch 2. The Smartwatch 3 had no issues with using the GPS connection of the paired iPhone, but if we were to leave the phone behind (like we attempted on two occasions), we'd be met with a never-ending "Acquiring GPS" tag before starting a run.