Rugged smartwatches are a necessity for tech enthusiasts who work in harsh conditions. Normally, I’d be ecstatic to get just a couple of those features in a watch at this price point but with all of that packed into a timeless design and offering a rather rugged and durable encasement without looking beefy or weighing a ton, this is a solid choice.
The Original XL comes with a classic stainless steel encasement and while the only option for the actual case is black, you may choose between several accent colors for that aluminum top ring around the watch face giving you options to make it your own.
In any case, using Tizen OS, you get the Samsung Health (it provides fitness tracking, including new exercise modes for both indoors and outdoors workouts and can accurately enough detect when the user switches the exercise; it can also track your sleeping time decently well), Bixby (a voice assistant – useful to perform calls or send emails) or the SOS function (tap the Home key three times to send an emergency message to your contacts or perform an SOS call).
In terms of sensors, the Casio WSD-F30 is equipped with a magnetic sensor for direction, a pressure sensor, an accelerometer, a gyrometer and a low-powered GPS (it also is compatible with GLONASS and Michibiki) – unfortunately, Casio decided against adding a Heart rate sensor, which is inexplicable, since you can find it on less costlier smartwatches.
Though most watches of this type have exquisite movements to keep time – mechanical movements are especially popular – there are some timepieces that are classified as luxury watches” even though more attention has been paid to the design than the actual workings of the watch itself.
The battery life was one of the best features of the rugged smartwatch, because, if you disabled the GPS and the heart-rate monitor and used the device only as a watch, you could get up to 2 Bookmarks weeks on a single charge (with the GPS on, you would get up to 24 hours and if used in UltraTrac mode (it accesses the satellite once a minute), the battery would deplete in about 60 hours).
