Best Smartwatches for Men – Hot Picks Today!
While we’re not out to widen the gender gap, there’s a number of very practical reasons for saying a certain smartwatch has masculine appeal. The strap is wider, designed for male anatomy, or the watch face is bigger, coming in at around the 46mm mark. It’s clearly one of the best fitness smartwatches for men, that’s just common sense, not misogyny.
We’re also going to play with probabilities and odds a little in this article. For example, it’s likely that men will be working in more challenging environments, using larger gym equipment, and generally engaging in activities that demand a tougher watch case. Equally true, but not an absolute, men are physically bigger and like bigger screens, filled with fantasy football league results and dad joke of the day notifications.
So, while we’re not out to reinforce stale stereotypes and outdated gender ideals, we know that there’s a collection of male-targeted smartwatches out there, and they need reviewing. A reasonable price will feature—whenever possible—but what we’re really looking for is something with a little bling and durability, a smartwatch that is every bit as wearable as it is App loaded and sensor packed. Dad jokes aside, men reading this article want a smartwatch that suits their lifestyle and unique needs.
Best Smartwatches widely chosen by Men!
Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra for Men
![Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 47mm LTE AI Smartwatch w/Energy Score, Wellness Tips, Heart Rate Tracking, Sleep Monitor, Fitness Tracker, GPS, 2024,Titanium Gray [US Version, 1Yr Manufacturer Warranty]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51LEqBkFViL._SL500_.jpg)
Let’s break it down. Why is this smartwatch one of the ‘best’ for men? It’s because of practical reasons, not antiquated thinking. The chunky 47mm watch face and rugged chassis appeals to men, especially those who enjoy a rough and tumble lifestyle. Its dark gray marine band looks particularly masculine, oozing a robust wearable design that’s ready for anything from an session in the gym to a long jog down a winding country trail.
Numerous functions popped up on the 1.5 inch super AMOLED display as our first tester, a man, stepped up to run the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra through its paces. The full Wear OS App system (Overlaid by Samsung Wear OS 5) intuitively guided our reviewer through countless functions and modes, the 48 hour sports mode keeping the charger cable at bay. A switch up to a 100 hour battery life was advertised in the marketing literature, but the resulting loss of desirable features while in power saving mode left our tester a tad annoyed.
Samsung stated more precise heart rate readouts from their sensor, and we had no reason to disbelieve their reps. They also said that an injection of Galaxy AI smarts was used to filter out extraneous factors, keeping physical movements and other factors out of the measurements so that readings became more accurate. We had to take it off to inspect the BioActive Sensor watching over wearer heart health, and that’s when we noticed the titanium tough case and Sapphire strengthened glass. No doubt about it, this wearable is built to handle rugged activities.
Smart timepiece buzz – Connectivity options are all-out maxed, with Bluetooth and 4G LTE locked and loaded. A light press of the Quick Button exposed user heart zones and hiker maps, as coordinated by a dual-frequency GPS chip. Is it among the best fitness smartwatches for men on the market? We believe so, especially after putting the MIL-STD-810H durability rated smartwatch through the proverbial grinder on a long run. The IP68 waterproofing held off the heavy rain on our jog, and the swim at the end of the jog washed off the 5ATM rated smartwatch, leaving it to focus on our attempts to break a past stroke record.
The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra is an Android user’s ideal wearable, tough and packed with Wear OS app functionality, as capably managed by a tiny 5-core processor and 32GB device memory. It also fit snugly, so advanced sleep metrics were recorded without discomfort. Turn-by-turn GPS guided navigation also worked like a charm.
Apple Watch Ultra 2 for Men
![Apple Watch Ultra 2 [GPS + Cellular 49mm] Smartwatch with Rugged Titanium Case & Blue Ocean Band. Fitness Tracker, Precision GPS, Action Button, Extra-Long Battery Life, Bright Retina Display](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41HEae62LxL._SL500_.jpg)
While the ‘Ultra’ tag seems to correspond to Men’s smartwatches, we promise that’s just a coincidence. The Apple Watch Ultra 2 has been selected because its available in a man sized 49mm configuration. To be clear, that’s the only size Apple engineers have appointed to this sports and outdoor adventuring series. A titanium shell encases all of that extra screen real estate, leaving plenty of room for the 3000 nit always-on Retina display. Its OLED panel really deepened blacks and made colored icons pop.
The Trail Loop band felt textile-tough on our reviewer’s wrist. It was soft enough not to leave abrasive marks on his wrist, yet tough enough to repel scrapes from granite cliff faces. If mountain scaling was out, then the 2.4 mile stage of a tough triathlon—water just above freezing point—couldn’t defeat the toughened watch, not with 100m water resistance fending off the chilly moisture. All the while, super-accurate sensors tracked heart rate and temperature, respiration and sleep health. Annoyingly, sleep only came to our resident MacHead after he’d finished shopping on the accessories web page.
For the higher price point, expect resilience and a larger face. Expect a wearable that features dual-band GPS and cellular connectivity, a device that won’t lose its umbilical to civilization. On that big, crisply rendered screen, health insights and workout apps work equitably alongside outdoorsman apps, like snowboarding monitors and dive depth trackers. Then, if fun were to turn to disaster, Apple Watch Ultra 2 is prepared, popping up heart irregularity alarms, sending out a call to an emergency service if a fall is detected, and just generally taking on the role of wrist-mounted guardian angel.
Smart timepiece buzz – After all that fun, still working hard to earn the title, among one of a select group of best fitness smartwatches for men, advanced sleep tracking activates to measure snooze health. No danger of the smartwatch being away from the sleeping users’ wrist—it’ll be providing constant overnight monitoring—a decent 36 hour battery life averts constant charging. And while that figure isn’t likely to bowl over long-distance off-the-grid hikers, we think the jump to 72 hours, with low power mode active, will have them feeling confident as they take their first determined steps while wearing this Apple approved wearable.
Every App and convenience, Siri on call and Apply Pay waiting in the wings, made this a standout smartwatch among our reviewers, even those who usually defer to Android devices. It’s a tough-as-nails, super-bright 49mm outdoorsman tech companion that’ll measure every workout, every adrenaline-fueled activity, and every recreational or competitive sporting event without breaking an electronic sweat.
Garmin Fenix 8 Smartwatch for Men
The review of the Garmin Fenix 8 pushes the review past the $1k boundary with some force. That’s because we’ve selected the 51mm model. It’s good to know Garmin makes smartwatch dials for the larger man. Also, older men with eyesight issues can have trouble reading tiny health metrics and GPS maps on a smaller screen, so the extra screen area was a real boon to our bespectacled outdoor sports reviewers, augmenting the AMOLED display.
Next, our review team and lone benchmarking expert took the smartwatch for a late run. A built-in flashlight illuminated dark sidewalks, helping us around a few paving cracks. Although this gave us some concern over battery drainage issues, the indicator still displayed a full charge, so we kept on jogging. A stop at the local gym was next, the titanium bezel on our loaner Garmin Fenix 8 smoothly rotating to select one of a score of available workout activities. Although a jump into the swimming pool wasn’t part of our schedule, we knew the 10ATM waterproof rating on the smartwatch would’ve taken care of swim stroke tracking. As it was, a cold shower didn’t give the leakproof watch buttons any trouble.
Work hard and play hard, rest even harder, that’s the office mantra. As our downtime hours approached, we didn’t want to have our expensive smartwatch taking any time off. We needn’t have worried, The Garmin Fenix 8 features golf course maps and skiview maps as well, switching seamlessly to Garmin Pay when we left the course shop with a new set of Titleist Pro VI golf balls. Music, notifications, an inbuilt speaker and microphone, the smartwatch boasted enough hardware extras to keep it busy all day long.
Smart timepiece buzz – Garmin has created their own popular sporting and adventuring smartwatch App ecosystem. It focuses on strength training and endurance sports, throwing in enough gym and outdoor fitness apps to satisfy any action junkie, no matter their physical condition. A wrist heart rate sensor and pulse blood oxygen sensor figure highly in this device, assuring respiratory health when the going gets tough. A compass, Satiq enhanced GPS guidance and a health monitoring thermometer, too, this wearable made our beefy tester feel like he had a combined doctor and trail expert on hand, all tiny and ready to hop off his wrist to impart valuable health and adventuring data.
Keeping this amount of sensory power online isn’t easy. Added to that is the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity, yet the manufacturers promise 13 days of always on operation. This figure climbs to 29 days without AOD (Always-On Display) and further jumps up to 41 days with Battery Saver Mode active.
Amazfit GTR 4 Smartwatch for Men
It’s the old-school masculine looks surrounding the Amazfit GTR 4 that suggests older analog inner mechanical workings. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. Other than the look, an advanced package of digital electronics lives inside the 34g aluminum alloy case. Speaking of, the case is built with slender 46x46x10.6mm dimensions. A high pixel density 1.43 inch AMOLED screen on top, a 475mAh battery and dual band GPS antennas below, the tech experts in our team had a lot of respect for this entry in our review.
This, at least in part, was due to the 150+ sports and workout monitoring modes and an emphasis on strength training. The latter feature, found on the Zepp App, displays knowledge on muscle groups and dumbbell sizes. Although either sex could take advantage of them, they felt like they were geared towards men, especially when that strength section was taken into account. We were testing it at a local gym, but we could just as easily have been on a hiking trail, using the dual-band circularly polarized GPS antenna to get a precise lock on our location. Long camping trips were also daydreamed into existence while we ran it through an automatically detected workout on the elliptical. Thinking about its energy requirements, the 14 day battery life would certainly encourage wilderness trekking.
The secret sauce powering the Amazfit GTR 4 high onto this list is the BioSensor 4 sensor. It accurately tracks heart rate and SpO2 (Blood oxygen) levels, monitoring respiration health so that we didn’t hyperventilate during or after a particularly strenuous gym routine. Built-in Alexa support let our tester listen to a few minutes of relaxing music on the integrated speaker, calming him as he sipped water. It’s tough testing fitness wearables, after all. Rested and ready again, he imported route files, this time opting to walk a local trail on his way home.
Smart timepiece buzz – Zepp App isn’t the same as Wear OS or Apple iOS Apps. As such, it might be a little limited. On the other hand, app compatibility is going to satisfy demanding men because the little wearable programs have been built from the ground up to work with this device. We also respected the hardcore statistics layout, a feature men tend to covet when they’re watching major sporting events. Data can be manipulated, training templates employed, and watch algorithms applied, all in service of improving existing fitness levels.
Just like music has an outro to conclude a powerful song, fitness apps should have a way of summarizing key data at the end of a workout, which then helps the athlete or hiker add motivating little extra improvements to their exercise routines. On the Amazfit GTR 4, Peakbeats and Zepp Coach deliver the goods, motivating and creating a summary of reached targets, complete with heart rate data and other fitness-centric health metrics.
Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan Smartwatch for Men
If a manufacturer has been bold enough to add the word ‘Grit’ and ‘Titan’ into the name of their product, who are we to argue? The grittiness credentials come from the military-grade titanium bezel and body. For squeezing all of the tech packed into this wearable, its 48.6×48.6×13.4mm form factor is man-sized. The man in question could very well be a Nordic adventurer, as the smartwatch can keep on working in icy -20 °C landscapes. No worries about it cracking under pressure, then, let’s see what makes the Polar Grit X2 Pro (Titan Edition) so smart.
The sapphire glass and durable bezel framing the 64g smartwatch had us in mind of a frontiersman-like model, something built purely for navigating the backwoods. Yet the cool inky black AMOLED display felt like something we’d find in a more traditional smartwatch. Essentially, it felt like a hybrid wearable, the big 1.39 inch, 454×454 pixel screen conserving precious battery energy by keeping most of its real estate dark. That’s not to say it wasn’t full of OLED color when an App called upon the required vibrant reds, blues, and greens, but it still felt built to function as a juice sipper, not a guzzler.
Flipping it over, having inspected the tactile side-mounted buttons for leakproof tightness, the sensors on the underside of the wearable looked every bit as intricate as the glass-topped watch face. A heart rate sensor was among these rear electronic parts, monitoring cardiovascular health with the aid of additional sensors for recording SpO2 and body temperature. Engaged on a mini hike on the city limits, we’d already installed the Polar Flow app and used it to meet two training targets. Hill splitter was handy during the lengthy walk, using automatic uphill and downhill detection to give a fuller picture of our efforts. What can we say? We live in a gradient-heavy area with lots of dips and peaks—and now, so do our legs.
Smart timepiece buzz – Sleep and swim fitness are the last two features we wanted to cover on the Polar Grit X2 Pro Titan. Regular watch owners don’t tend to think of sleep as a ‘fitness’ attribute, but our tour around the smartwatch community has been something of a revelation. Sleep health is essential if a workout warrior wants to wake up ready to take on the world. With the sleepwise mode taking care of our snooze habits, measuring light and deep sleep hours and bedtime trends, waking alertness was happily better. For swimming, everything from stroke style to pace and technique was picked up by the WR100 water resistant smartwatch case.
Turn-by-turn mapping, 10 day smartwatch mode, barometer and magnetometer compass, too, Bluetooth equipped Polar Grit X2 Pro smartwatches are built to inspire and motivate. They also feature superb dual-frequency GPS support, including every service from Russian built Glonass to Galileo and Beidou, which originates in China.
Suunto Vertical Smartwatch for Men
Reviewers were at first tempted to test one of their diving smartwatches, but it didn’t quite feel like one of the best fitness smartwatches for men, especially with its dive specific features suggesting the need for a scuba outfit. Instead, we selected the Suunto Vertical, a wearable with a 79g heft. It’s hard to argue against the masculine feel of this device, with its chunky 49x49x13.6mm glass fiber polyamide housing and very nearly unbreakable Sapphire glass face delivering an undeniable masculine vibe.
The -20°C to +55°C operational temperature range means that this male wearer can be out on the Alaskan tundra or caught up in a Safari in deepest Kenya without fear of temperature-related failure. The Titanium Solar edition was selected, but it was the bezel that came to us with titanium grade five strength, not the housing. Even so, the 95+ workout modes and 60 day (Up to) battery life implied lots of future outdoors activities, every one of them faithfully measured and stored by our new Suunto smartwatch.
It was the off-the-beaten track credentials of the smartwatch that really caught our lead reviewer’s attention. Accurate GPS mapping is one thing, but this spatially aware wearable could access easily interpreted land contours, river courses, and even small elevation changes, all in real time. Offline stored maps were also catered for, so there was no problem navigating obscure terrain when we were far from a cellular tower. Speaking of, the Suunto Vertical uses Bluetooth to connect to mobile cellular devices, has media controls on the watch, and uses the Suunto app to manage activities.
Smart timepiece buzz – We used that app to connect Strava, and set off for destinations unknown. The sun was up and solar charging feature active. The only thing missing was some music to add a beat to the walk. Suunto Aqua wireless headphones provided the good beats, hooking up to the smartwatch via Bluetooth. If we wanted to cool off in a nearby creek, bone conduction technology in the headphones paired remarkably well with the 10m snorkeling depth of the water resistant smartwatch.
While the display behind the toughened Sapphire glass isn’t some form of super-vibrant OLED technology, the 280×280 pixel density found on the matrix display was sharp enough to read in unpleasant weather conditions and on dusky evenings. Features dual band GPS connectivity, storm and other weather warnings, and an integrated heart rate sensor. We amused ourselves by looking for pulse rate jumps during one of those storms, taking shelter in a local hostel, the built-in barometer and altimeter telling us we’d climbed high enough to deserve a re-energizing drink.
The Best Smartwatch for the Modern Man
A quick proviso needs to be stated before going any further. Smartwatches are fun, they’re accurate, and they’ve become invaluable trail partners, too. Without any argument at all, their sensors are accurate and should be trusted. However, the health metrics displayed on a wearable device should never be prioritized over the advice of a medical professional. That said, let’s see if one of these best fitness smartwatches for men hits the heights, both figuratively and literally.
The Polar Grit X2 Pro comes out of the gates strong, operating across a wide range of temperatures. It’s also an ECG on your wrist, which is better than a plain old pulse rate monitoring wearable. Then there’s the always competitive battle between the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra and the Apple Watch Ultra 2. There’s very little separating these two brand leaders. The Apple device is a little more expensive, the Samsung a little more rounded and traditional looking, but they’re both feature-packed and operate as cellular capable, so there’s no need to carry along a smartphone.
The outsider choice has to be the Garmin Fenix 8 smartwatch for men. It’s a 51mm timepiece with both urban and outdoorsman appeal. Garmin apps take the device through scores of workouts and endurance level hiking or athletic activities, then there’s Garmin Pay to take care of refreshments after the adrenaline starts breaking down in your body after a big run.
Smartwatches may not be grey and steely or pink and flowery, separating genders with outdated stereotypes, but there really are models and outsized editions that favor the male form and rugged lifestyles. They’re loaded with no-nonsense aesthetics, supporting you through the daily grind every bit as well as they take charge of your sporting endeavors and competitive weekend warrior activities. So jog on back to the start of this review, reread the candidates we’ve selected, and strap on the smartwatch that’s as tough—and charming—as you are.
