The Best Watch Right Now: Digital, Analog, and Smartwatches
Whether you’ve been perusing the best watches for women online or checking out options for men’s watches at a brick and mortar shop, choosing the best watch isn’t always easy. Along with shoes, handbags, and wallets, timepieces tend to be something we use for years and even pass down to future generations. Today, watches come with plenty of features and options — so much so, in fact, that for some people, choosing a watch can be overwhelming. The biggest decision in picking out a watch for yourself is, by far, the decision between digital and analog.
Both digital and analog watches have their benefits, and when it comes to choosing a winner, it’s not quite as simple as declaring one watch type over the other. Rather, deciding between a digital and analog watch is a personal decision, and it should be based on your own individual preferences.
So should you go digital or keep it old school with a leather-banded analog watch? The choice is yours, and to help you make that all-important decision, you’ll find all the perks and downfalls of each watch type below.
Digital Watch Benefits
The biggest benefit of a digital watch is simple: you can know the time much quicker than with an analog watch. Even if you’re speedy at reading an analog watch, nothing compares with looking at the face of a digital watch and knowing instantly what time it is. The time reading you get from a digital watch will be much more precise than an analog watch, making it a great option for those who have tight schedules and need to keep track of time down to the minute. Most digital watches will display the hour, minute, and second on the face, making it easy to time an event. Additionally, digital watches also tend to have more features than analog watches, including stopwatch features, timers, glowing screens, and even heart rate monitors in some of the more advanced models.
Digital Watch Disadvantages
For as practical as digital watches may be, they do have some disadvantages. One major disadvantage of digital watches is the fact that they are made in mass, meaning that you miss out on individual craftsmanship, which so often accompanies analog watches. Furthermore, digital watches tend to use more battery power than analog watches, making their battery lives shorter than analog watches.
Analog Watch Benefits
When it comes to analog watches, the biggest benefit of these timeless pieces is the craftsmanship. In wearing an analog watch, you’re wearing a piece of art, rather than a digital mechanism. Of course, analog watches are also practical in telling the time, but they use much less electric energy than digital watches, and for that reason, have much longer-lasting batteries.
Furthermore, analog watches have a sort of heirloom quality to them, meaning that you can keep them in the family for years to come and they never go out of style. Analog watches are classy and convey a sense of responsibility that digital watches just can’t compete with. You’ll often see professionals wearing analog watches rather than digital watches for this precise reason.
Analog Watch Disadvantages
However, as timeless and aesthetically pleasing as analog watches may be, they too have their disadvantages. The most common reason shoppers choose digital watches over analog watches is because analog watches rarely offer as many features as digital watches. Even if you are able to use an analog watch as a compass, that just simply doesn’t compare to all the features a digital watch can offer, from telling the date to being used as a stopwatch.
Don’t Forget About Smartwatches
If you’ve decided between an analog watch and digital watch and are ready to spend some cash on purchasing a new time-teller, don’t go swiping your credit card just yet. One more type of watch has recently hit the market, and it certainly deserves its fair share of attention. Smartwatches are watches that are able to access an internet connection and function similarly to a smartphone. From checking your email to answering a call, the smartwatches of today are capable of a great many tasks, and they’ll only be getting more and more advanced as we head into the future.
The one major downside of smartwatches? They can be pricey. Smartwatches can cost hundreds of dollars, where digital, and even analog, watches don’t come close as far as price point. That being said, if you’re on a limited budget, it’s probably time to put away any dreams you might have of owning a smartwatch and instead invest in a reliable analog or digital watch until the prices of smartwatches drop with time.
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