And when walking without a natural arm motion, such as when I'm holding a phone in my hand, the lack of back-and-forth movement can befuddle the accelerometer. Something as simple as stretching or pointing at something can trigger it. Plus, like I said before, everyday false positives for steps are a real problem.Įven though the Garmin Forerunner 265 won the battle for step accuracy, I have noticed my step count climbing when doing nothing but sitting at my desk. The point is, this is hardly a scientific test, and you might have very different results depending on your height, walking stride, cadence, and other factors. (Image credit: Michael Hicks / Android Central) It's not clear how many brands are actually improving them from year to year, now that they've hit a certain baseline of accuracy. But to be fair, you almost never hear anything about a watch's accelerometer being X% more accurate than the last generation in marketing materials. Moreover, I don't have the latest versions of certain brands' flagship watches like the Fitbit Sense 2 or Apple Watch Series 8. I don't own (or couldn't fit) every smartwatch brand I missed a lot of Wear OS watches like Pixel Watch, TicWatch, and Fossil Gen 6, as well as other running brands like Polar. ![]() But no way am I doing it again, sorry friends! You can try the experiment at home yourself to see what results you get, if you want. So, yeah, I thought about doing the test again, possibly with other watches from the same brands, or just to see if the winners and losers were consistent. Then I walked in 93º weather while all of my neighbors gave me very judgy and confused stares (aka "Why the heck is this weirdo wearing six watches? Is he the Clock King?"), trying to keep count in my head while keeping a consistent walking pace. In theory, a watch being slightly higher on my arm could have affected the results a bit, so I did my best to mitigate that and kept them close together. I had no idea how tedious it would be to find a bunch of dead watches sitting in my closet, find all the proprietary charging cables, recharge and update them one by one, sync them to my Android phone or iPhone, and then squeeze three watches onto each wrist. These watches' step counts were almost exactly the same, but Garmin's was still slightly more accurate than COROS'. Apple (110), Samsung (113), and Fitbit (292) take up the final three spots. Amazfit's flagship watch (62 steps off) and the COROS APEX 2 Pro (81) take second and third place, both predictably doing well for running data. Ranking them for closest accuracy, the Garmin Forerunner 265 is the clear winner, just 15 steps off in total and only 1 off for running tracking. Dedicated running watches do better, including Fitbit (despite its early step-counting struggles). The running results only look more accurate at first glance quintuple the difference, and you can see how, in particular, the Apple Watch Series 6 and Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro struggle to accurately count running strides, compared to walking. So if you go out for a walk and hit 10K, you can generally assume you're not too far off the mark. Ignoring the Fitbit Sense's surprisingly inaccurate walking results for a moment, you can see that most of these watches fall within a ☑00-step range of the real result - or double that for 10,000 steps. Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro: 5,074 walking, 1,039 running.Garmin Forerunner 265: 5,014 walking, 999 running.Fitbit Sense: 4,714 walking, 994 running.COROS APEX 2 Pro: 5,070 walking, 989 running.Apple Watch: 4,940 walking, 1,050 running.Amazfit T-Rex Ultra: 5,046 walking, 984 running. ![]() ![]() That aside, here were my smartwatch step counter test results after walking 5,000 steps and running 1,000 steps:
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