When it comes to buying a smartwatch, there are many questions to ask yourself. But the first should always be, do you want a smartwatch with a touch screen, like those from Apple and Samsung, or do you want one of the best hybrid smartwatches with a more traditional look?
As the name suggests, hybrid smartwatches are an amalgamation of the best smartwatches (generally speaking, those with touchscreens) and the best mechanical watches, with their physical hands and limited functionality. Hybrid watches usually offer a traditional-looking face but with an extra dial or two displaying information like steps taken, hours slept, battery life, and smart notifications.
Your walking – plus running, cycling and sometimes even swimming – is tracked and logged by an onboard accelerometer. Some hybrids include a vibration motor that alerts you to something on your phone or wakes you with a silent alarm. A major bonus of hybrid smartwatches is their battery life, measured in weeks, months or even years.
The best hybrid smartwatches to buy right now
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The Withings Scanwatch is the brand's most innovative wearable to date, packing a tremendous amount of health and fitness tracking tech into a slender body. The ScanWatch is available in 38mm and 42mm case sizes, with black or white dials and 15 different strap options, ensuring it'll suit any outfit.
Beneath the attractive face, the Withings ScanWatch has a heart rate monitor, ECG functionality, and a new system for measuring blood oxygen saturation. The ScanWatch can also detect breathing disturbances, track sleep, and log your walking, running, cycling, swimming and more.
On top of all this, the tiny monochrome display at the 12 o'clock position can display incoming calls and other notifications from your Bluetooth-connected smartphone using the free Health Mate app (iOS and Android).
Read our full Withings Scanwatch review.
The Garmin Vivomove HR is one of the most comprehensive hybrid watches you can buy today, with a wide range of fitness- and health-tracking features, a subtle digital display, and several different colours to pick from.
This hybrid has key features like constant heart rate monitoring, the ability to estimate your VO2 Max and fitness age, and wellness monitoring tools which kick in and suggest you take a moment to breathe when showing signs of stress.
What makes the Vivomove HR stand out from the crowd is how it features a touchscreen display beneath its traditional hour and minute hands, giving you the best of both worlds.
Another hybrid watch that hides its smartness, this timepiece by Fossil features activity and sleep tracking, plus app and call alerts, multiple time zones, and buttons to control your smartphone music playback. Yet it mostly looks like a regular watch, aside from the e-ink display on the dial.
As with other Fossil hybrid watches, the Activist works with iPhones and Androids, and instead of having a rechargeable battery, you'll have to replace the regular watch battery after six months.
The case measures 42mm across, and the leather strap is fitted to industry-standard 22mm lugs. Water resistance is rated at 5 ATM.
Mondaine is most famous for producing watches which resemble its classic Swiss railways clocks, but the Helvetica range is different - and it includes this, the company’s first hybrid smartwatch. The Helvetica 1 has a 44mm stainless steel case, with 20mm leather strap and a quartz movement.
Compatible with iOS and Android, the watch’s smart features include activity and sleep tracking, with data being sent to the companion smartphone app. There is also a second dial on the watch face to show how much of your daily step goal you have completed.
The Mondaine uses the same MMT smartphone app as hybrid watches made by Alpina and Frederique Constant, so there is detailed sleep data, an estimate of calories burned, and advice from the virtual coach. It isn’t a match for the fully-fledged smartwatch apps of Apple, Samsung and Google, but presents a nice set of extra features for buyers of traditional Swiss watches who want to dip their toes into the smartwatch waters.
Many hybrids look similar to regular watches, but we thing this Kronaby Steel 41mm is one which really keeps its smarts under wraps, thanks to its traditional face, strap, and buttons which to the untrained eye look like mere chronograph controls.
But scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find the technology. There is a battery which lasts up to two years, a vibration motor for alerting you to notifications on your phone and waking you up silently each morning, and of course a daily step count.
Additional features include a stopwatch and timer, a button which can be configured to control your phone’s camera, and even IFTTT (If This, Then That), so the watch’s location can be set to trigger smart home devices into life. For example, you could have your smart lights and coffee machine automatically switch on when you arrive home wearing this watch.
A second, smaller option from Swiss watchmaker Mondaine is this Helvetica Smartwatch 40mm. With its more compact case, this watch keep sits smartness almost completely hidden, thanks to there being no digital display and the second complication (daily activity percentage) only pointed to when you press the crown.
This Swiss-made watch comes with a leather strap attached to industry-standard 20mm lug bars, and is water resistant to 30 metres. The case is stainless steel and the front is protected by scratch-resistant sapphire crystal with an anti-reflective coating.
While hybrid watches are usually at the more affordable end of the scale, there are exceptions like this timepiece by Frederique Constant, for example.
Its smarts work in a similar way to other hybrids, in that an accelerometer tracks your steps, movement and sleep, then the data is sent to a smartphone app over Bluetooth. But this particular hybrid comes from a bona fide luxury Swiss watchmaker, with the design and build quality you would expect.
The Horological Smartwatch is powered by an MMT-285 quartz movement, which sits inside a 42mm stainless steel case that is protected by a convex sapphire crystal and water resistant to 5 ATM. Battery life is a claimed two years.
The Vivomove smartwatch range by Garmin includes no fewer than 15 different variants. Case sizes include 39, 42 and 44mm.
Much of the range are fully-fledges smartwatches with colour touch screen displays, but four are hybrids, with traditional hands and a small touch screen display at 6 o’clock for showing extra info and notifications.
Known as the Vivomore 3S, this hybrid is available in four different styles, all with a fairly compact 39mm case, and industry-standard straps. The display only appears when you need it, showing your step count, heart rate, hydration level and sleep score. There’s also integrated GPS, a feature for tracking your stress levels, and a five-day battery life. For a hybrid, that’s a huge range of features.
The beauty of most hybrid watches is how they hide their technology, and nowhere is that more apparent than with the Holst, by Danish watchmaker Skagen.
This smart and simple timepiece has a subtle 0-100 scale between the 7 o’clock and 9 o’clock, indicating the percentage of your daily step target you have completed. Just press a button, and the watch points to what you’ve achieved so far.
The Holst, which has a 40mm case diameter and is 13mm thick, also tracks your exercise and sleep, sending data back to your smartphone over a Bluetooth connection. Calls, texts and other notifications are buzzed through to the wearable, which vibrates and points its hands to alert you and say what type of notification it is. The watch runs off a standard CR2032 coin-cell battery, which is claimed to last around six months.
We could forgive most shortcomings of the Instinct Crossover Solar, but not the price. Garmin watches aren’t cheap, but the Instinct has always been one of the more affordable watches; that’s not the case here. You’ll need to shell out serious monies for the analogue hands, the dial and Revodrive tech – is it worth it?
Even though we enjoyed using the watch, we can’t recommend it unless you’re really, really keen on the analogue hands. There are pretty hybrid watches on the market (Withings Scanwatch, listed above) that can measure ECG and track fitness for half the price of the Instinct Crossover Solar.
And although Garmin is more accurate than those, the whole point of hybrid watches is that they appeal to people who don’t like the look of digital watches. Those people won’t like the look of the Instinct Crossover – who’s going to buy it, then?
Read our full Garmin Instinct Crossover Solar review.
How to buy the best hybrid smartwatch for you
Unlike smartwatches, which often put their technology ahead of their aesthetics, hybrids look more like regular watches. This means there is a huge range of styles and sizes to choose from. You can even opt for a well-known Swiss brand like Mondaine and its Helvetica 1 hybrid or the Hybrid Manufacturer by Frederique Constant.
At the other end of the price range, we have Withings (which recently bought itself back from Nokia), producer of the Steel HR. Most hybrid watches accept regular straps, so can easily be given a makeover to match your favourite outfits.
Some hybrids have heart rate monitors, but some don’t, so if you want your watch to double as a personal trainer, then you’ll need to bear this in mind. Similarly, some offer more fitness tracking features than others, some are water resistant to greater depths, and most sold by companies belonging to the Fossil Group have a very similar companion smartphone app. As do several Swiss hybrids and their shared MMT app.
