1. The list in brief
2. Best overall
3. Best for Pixel
4. Best for outdoors
5. Best for battery life
6. Best budget
7. Best for running
8. Best for fitness tracking
9. Best for sleep tracking
10. Best for swimming
10. How we test
11. How to choose
12. Latest updates
So you’ve forked out for one of the best phones and need the best Android smartwatch to pair with it, but which of the many options is right for you? You might be searching for a smartwatch that will offer superior productivity support, will fit the bill as the best fitness tracker, or offer the best of both worlds. Finding the right wearable for you can be easier said than done.
Over the years, we’ve put a wide variety of top contenders to the test, looking closely at factors such as performance, fit, software support and more. As a result, we’re confident we know what it takes to identify the top Android wearables worth their place on your wrist.
We’ve looked at smartwatches from Samsung, Google, Fitbit and Garmin, with options to suit an array of different needs and budgets. Below, you’ll find our picks for the best Android smartwatches in Australia.
The quick list
Below you'll find a summarised roundup of our picks for the best Android smartwatch in Australia. We've selected a range of models, comprising various brands that cater to specific uses and budgets.
Best overall
Samsung's latest is its greatest, offering excellent fitness and health features in a package that is a joy to use. It pairs best with a Samsung smartphone, but all Android owners will find something to love.
Best for Pixel
The Google Pixel Watch 2 maintains the gorgeous design of its predecessor, but makes many notable improvements in overall performance to make it undeniably the best Android smartwatch for Pixel owners.
Best for outdoors
If you spend a good portion of your time outside and you want to track whatever it is you get up to, then the Fenix 7 is more than up to the task.
Best for battery life
With up to 45 days worth of life, the TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra wants to keep on keeping on. You can get longer from some Fitbits, but the overall package from TicWatch is why it gets our vote.
Best budget
If you just want to track steps and runs, receive a few notifications and are on a budget, not a lot comes close to the Fitbit Versa 3.
Best for running
Rocking a gorgeous AMOLED display, a tonne of useful metrics and stellar battery life, the Garmin Forerunner 265 is essential for runners.
Reveal the next 3 products...
Best for health tracking
Garmin's Venu 3 took an already great smartwatch and made it even better. It not only looks great, but it offers plenty in the way of health features, including guided meditations and a wheelchair user-specific mode. It also lets you make and receive calls right on your wrist.
Best for sleep tracking
The overall smartwatch experience isn't the best around, but if sleep tracking is your priority then the Fitbit Sense 2 is well worth your consideration.
Best for swimming
It might have runner in its name, but the Garmin Forerunner 945 is one of the best to track distance, strokes, breathing and more when in the water.
The best Android smartwatch for 2023
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Scroll through the list to read more in-depth reviews for each of our best Android smartwatch picks. You can also click through to read the full reviews, written by TechRadar's team of smartwatch experts, and easily check the latest deals using our price comparison widget.
The best Android smartwatch overall
The Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 is the natural evolution of its Watch 5 predecessor. Once again, this is a smart looking watch in every sense of the word. It looks great on your wrist while offering powerful features and its super AMOLED display is both sharp and clear, as well as able to handle very bright outdoor scenes.
Performance wise this latest-gen Galaxy Watch is both fast and responsive, although notably more so when paired with a Samsung smartphone. There's no iPhone support here either, so if you were hoping to pair this Wear OS watch with iOS, you're out of luck, but you can use some of the models listed further down.
Samsung has stuffed the Galaxy Watch 6 with features, including improved sleep tracking and Custom Workouts that triathletes in particular should appreciate. And once again, Samsung has enabled the Galaxy Watch 6 to analyse your body composition, with accurate results.
All this is a neat and affordable package is what makes the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 the best Android smartwatch overall.
Read our full Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 review.
The best Android smartwatch for Pixel
Google made a safe but significant upgrade in the Pixel Watch 2. Its predecessor wasn't a bad smartwatch, but there were areas that could've done with improvement, and that's exactly what the Pixel Watch 2 gives you.
The overall design has remained largely the same, save for a thinner piece of glass covering the display, but that's hardly a negative against it, since we found the original model to be one of the best-looking smartwatches money could buy. What Google has done with this model is made it lighter, which not only aids comfort during the day, but also at night so you're more likely to wear it to bed so you can track your sleep.
The charging pad has changed, which is definitely a good thing, as it now provides a faster charge. And you might need it, since you're only looking at roughly a day's use from a single charge. The rival Apple Watch is similar in this regards, but when you have other brands producing smartwatches that can last days or even weeks, it is a little disappointing.
Elsewhere, however, it's good news. There's automatic workout detection onboard (finally) and a new multi-path heart rate sensor that claims to more accurately monitor your heart beat, especially during more intense workouts. A new selection of safety features also work in the Pixel Watch 2's favour.
As a smartwatch, the Pixel Watch 2 is great, too. It's a perfect showcase for Wear OS, being quick to navigate around and managed to pick up Google Assistant voice prompts with no issue at all.
Read our full Google Pixel Watch 2 review
The best Android smartwatch for outdoors
For anyone who can't stay still, the Garmin Fenix 7 is a perfect smartwatch for tracking everything possible. It gives you all the tools you could need to understand your current fitness level, as well as to set and achieve your goals.
The Fenix 7 offers advanced workout tracking and training tools, along with superb navigation apps, and offers a sturdy build for the purposes of adventuring. That said, its size and ruggedness might be excessive for someone that simply wants a stylish timepiece.
Its display could also look sharper and it may not be the same level of productivity powerhouse that many of its competitors are, but for the avid adventurer or fitness fanatic this is a powerful investment.
Read our full Garmin Fenix 7 review
The best Android smartwatch for battery life
We haven't reviewed the TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra ourselves here at TechRadar, but our sister site Tom's Guide gave it such a glowing review, that we felt compelled to include it here on this list.
The standout feature of the TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra is its long-lasting battery, which is good for up to 45 days. You will need to turn off certain features in order to eke out so much juice, but even with said features disabled, you still get a decent Android smartwatch experience, especially for the low price you'll pay.
Our colleagues at Tom's Guide also loved the always-on display, which actually employs two separate layers: one being the main AMOLED display and the other being a low power screen that just shows basic but essential information. It's this feature that helps to lengthen the time between charges.
Elsewhere you get a good suite of sports to track and monitor and built-in GPS to keep a record of your distances. The main gripe that continues to plague the TicWatch 3 Pro Ultra, however, is the lack of the latest Wear OS 3. Mobvoi released the TicWatch in 2021 and yet, there is still no update for it. A beta has been released in 2023, so we expect the full version to see the light of day eventually, we're just still not sure when.
Read the full TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra GPS review (Tom's Guide)
The best budget Android smartwatch
The Fitbit Versa 3 may not be a strictly Android smartwatch like most others on this list, but its ability to pair more than well enough with Android smartphones and stand out with quality features and performance makes it worthy of consideration – especially at its price point. And that price is now even more attractive given the Versa 3 now sits as a generation behind the latest Fitbit Versa 4.
But the latest Fitbit Versa, despite being newer, is inferior to the Versa 3 for a few key reasons. Namely, the update to the line loses some key features found in the Versa's third generation, such as the ability to support third-party apps and music playback when not connected to Wi-Fi.
With built-in GPS and a quality AMOLED display, the Fitbit Versa 3 dazzles particularly as a fitness tracker, which comes as no surprise with it being a Fitbit. As we mentioned in our review, "the Fitbit Versa 3 is an excellent wearable, though it's more a fitness tracker than a smartwatch, with very limited productivity apps on offer."
Regardless, if you're looking for a quality wearable to pair with your Android smartphone and you're shopping with a slightly tighter budget, there's every chance the Versa 3 might be the perfect fit for you.
Read our full Fitbit Versa 3 review
The best Android smartwatch for running
Garmin didn't do anything drastically different when developing the Forerunner 265. The company took the already-excellent Forerunner 255, redesigned the case slightly, gave it an AMOLED screen and voila. And the result is one of the best running watches Garmin has ever made.
The new AMOLED screen is bright and easy to read and use, and while it does impact battery life slightly compared to its predecessor, you are still able to close to two weeks of use from a single charge, depending on how you use it and which features you have enabled.
The Forerunner 265 adopts a number of features from other past Foreunner models, including offline music storage, Training Readiness and Morning Report, which can all be used to help elevate your training and track your progress with ease and accuracy.
Read our full Garmin Forerunner 265 review
The best Android smartwatch for fitness tracking
The Garmin Venu 3 does an awful lot, very well. In many ways, it's the perfect blend of smartwatch and fitness tracker in a gorgeous package, not just for Android phones but any phone. Chief to its appeal is the stunning display, which really is one of the best we've laid eyes on and then you have its battery life, which can be up to 14 days depending on how you use it.
Garmin has also now integrated a microphone and speaker, which means you're free to make and receive calls from the Venu 3 itself. The speaker has multiple uses, too, such as being able to play guided meditations, for example, which is very handy indeed.
The overall health and fitness tracking capabilities have been improved as well. You can track and record results for pretty much any exercise discipline you can think of, and sleep tracking has been upgraded too, and everything is collated to give you an overall health score.
The Garmin Venu 3's predecessor was already a fantastic performer, but the Venu 3 manages to improve in virtually every way. It can be pricey, but we think it's worth every cent.
Read our full Garmin Venu 3 review
The best Android smartwatch for sleep trackong
The Fitbit Sense 2 does a lot right. It retains the excellent health-tracking of its predecessor, improves upon the stress-tracking features and throws a physical button onto the side of the case that has a genuine use. But unfortunately, Fitbit removed the ability to install third-party apps, meaning you're locked into the Fitbit ecosystem. This may not be a deal breaker for some, but it's something to take note of.
While we wouldn't outright recommend the Fitbit Sense 2 as the best smartwatch for your wrist, it is one of the best for tracking your sleep. The Sense series is all about holistic health as to opposed to fitness health, and as a result does a good job of showing you good statistics each morning when you wake up. The only downside, is these stats are hidden behind a Premium subscription.
Pay the extra cost however, and you may find your sleep quality and duration can improve.
Read our full Fitbit Sense 2 review
The best Android smartwatch for swimming
If you're a keen swimmer and want the best Android smartwatch to track each stroke, lap and overall distance, the Garmin Forerunner 945 is the one for you. You can get it in a bundle with two chest-strap heart rate monitors: one for running and cycling, and another specifically designed for the pool.
We'd encourage to seek out the chest straps, as they can pick up changes in your heart rate more quickly than a sensor on your wrist. But, the wirst-based heart rate monitor on the Forerunner 945 itself is still good, and more crucially, it works underwater.
It also has a built-in music player, so you can use it together with a pair of waterproof headphones to listen to tracks in the water, and there's a huge range of features tailored to swimming. Open-water swimming metrics include distance (with GPS tracking), pace, stroke count/rate, stroke distance and efficiency, plus calories burned.
There are more options for pool sessions, such as stroke type detection, pacing alerts, auto rest, specialised pool workouts (which can be downloaded to the watch via Wi-Fi), and drill logging.
Add on the huge array of other fitness tracking tools, plus smartwatch features like contactless payments, and this is an exceptional watch in and out of the water.
Read our full Garmin Forerunner 945 review
How we test the best Android smartwatches
When testing a smartwatch we pair it to our phones and use it for days, so we can tell what it's like for everyday use - this includes working out its true battery life, seeing how it handles notifications, and appreciating any extra features it has.
We also take it for workouts with us, so we can see if it's accurate at measuring distances and time, and to see if the fitness modes bring any cool extras.
To create our ranking we considered our review score, the specs, features, performance, price, and how they stack up to alternatives.
How to choose the best Android smartwatch
How to choose the best Android smartwatch for you
First off, don't buy an Apple Watch, as they don't work with Android.
Beyond that it's a case of picking one with the features you need. Do you care about being able to take an ECG or is basic heart rate monitoring enough? Are you into health and fitness or do you mostly just want notifications? Consider all that, along with what prices and styles suit you.
Do these smartwatches also work with an iPhone?
Most smartwatches that work with Android will also work with an iPhone. However, you might lose out on some functionality, and there are a few that won't work at all, such as the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and 5, as well as the Google Pixel Watch. For the best results with an iPhone, stick to an Apple Watch or consider a less costly option from Fitbit.
