Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever were a significant part of what was one of the most electrifying seasons in Women’s National Basketball Association history.
Databricks and its lakehouse platform for data management and analytics, conversely, was a key part of what helped the Fever to their most successful season since 2016.
Clark, who recently finished a record-setting rookie season with the Fever, is perhaps best known for draining long-range shots and making spectacular passes. Her 769 total points (19.2 per game) and 337 assists (8.4 per game) set league records for a rookie — so did her 223 turnovers. And she helped the Fever improve from 13-27 in 2023 to 20-20 in a 2024 season that ended last Sunday night with the New York Liberty topping the Minnesota Lynx for the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) championship.
But her performance, and the Fever’s success, weren’t mere happenstance. They weren’t just the result of a generational player joining the team and the team becoming more successful.
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In the background of both Clark’s success as well as the Fever’s overall improvement was Databricks’ lakehouse platform, which enabled the Fever to view and analyze data in ways previously impossible.
In a sense, Clark’s arrival this past season was fortuitous timing.
Pacers Sports & Entertainment — owner of the Fever along with the NBA’s Indiana Pacers, Gainbridge Fieldhouse where the Fever and Pacers play, the Indiana Mad Ants of the NBA’s G League and minor league baseball’s Reno Aces — only started using Databricks in April 2022.
Before that, the organization’s data was an untidy muddle of myriad systems and isolated data, according to Jared Chavez, Pacers Sports and Entertainment’s manager of data engineering and strategy.
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“There was no crossover,” he said.
Clark’s arrival certainly would have had some impact on the Fever’s success regardless of how well the team could analyze data and use it to inform its on-court performance.
But perhaps it wouldn’t have been quite as significant. Perhaps a couple of close games would have gone against the Fever instead of for them had the Fever not been making data-informed decisions throughout the game leading up to the drama at the end. Perhaps what was the Fever’s first playoff appearance and .500 season since 2016 would have been their eighth straight losing one.
From problem to solution
Before making Databricks’ lakehouse platform the hub for its entire data management and analytics operations in April 2022, Pacers Sports and Entertainment’s most important franchises — the Pacers and Fever — suffered from isolated data.
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The Pacers’ basketball-related data was kept on premises while business-related data such as sales and marketing was stored in a cloud-based data warehouse. The Fever, meanwhile, were not yet analyzing on-court data while their business-related data was kept in multiple Microsoft Azure Synapse databases that weren’t integrated.
“Every single department had data living in one of our warehouses that was cut off from the rest of them, or they didn’t have data flowing into anything,” Chavez said
In addition to an inability to integrate data, Pacers Sports & Entertainment’s data operations were costly given the disparate systems for which the organization was paying.
To better enable its teams to compete with other franchises on the court, the organization needed a data ecosystem rather than a series of isolated tools. To improve its financial bottom line, it needed to get a better return on its investment from its data operations.
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The company decided to start over on a new system.
Pacers Sports and Entertainment, parent company of the NBA’s Pacers and WNBA’s Fever, is using Databricks to fuel both its on-court data analysis as well as it enterprise analytics operations.
In retrospect, Databricks seems like a logical choice for Pacers Sports & Entertainment. One of the advantages of the vendor’s lakehouse platform is that it was designed to enable large organizations to centralize their data, both structured and unstructured, to enable integration, according to Alexander Booth, a solutions architect at Databricks.
Sports franchises collect not only large amounts of traditional structured data such as financial records and point-of-sale transactions on the business side but also petabytes of unstructured data such as motion capture data on the performance side. Even on the performance side, there is structured data that includes traditional statistics such as home runs in baseball, points in basketball, or goals in hockey and soccer that needs to be integrated with unstructured data to develop a more complete view of what is taking place during competition.
As a result, Databricks makes sense for an organization like Pacers Sports & Entertainment.
“Databricks excels in sports analytics due to its capacity to handle large volumes of diverse data types in real time,” Booth, who previously was assistant director of baseball R&D for Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers, said. “This includes … complex data sources such as biomechanics, videos and detailed reports with natural language [that can be integrated to feed] machine learning and AI models.”
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Despite the data integration enabled by Databricks’ lakehouse, the platform was not the first choice for Pacers Sports & Entertainment in 2022. Chavez, who joined Pacers Sports and Entertainment in early 2022, was familiar with Snowflake, perhaps Databricks’ closest rival.
Starting with Snowflake, however, required a bigger initial investment than Pacers Sports and Entertainment wanted to make, according to Chavez. Databricks, meanwhile, offers pay-as-you-go pricing, so based on finances as much as anything else, the organization decided to migrate its data operations to the vendor’s lakehouse platform.
“At the time, it was a money decision,” Chavez said. “We were hemorrhaging on our old infrastructure, and we didn’t have the money to go with what I was familiar with at the time, which was Snowflake. Looking back, I’m glad we didn’t.”
Data analysis with Databricks
Pacers Sports & Entertainment is not yet using Databricks to analyze the Pacers’ on-court performance.
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It is, however, using Databricks’ lakehouse platform to store, integrate and analyze most of the organization’s other data. In total, in the 30 months since Pacers Sports & Entertainment scrapped its inefficient data management and analytics operations, the company has either migrated to or rebuilt on Databricks more than 60 systems.
When Pacers Sports & Entertainment first started using Databricks for some of its data operations, the results were almost immediate, according to Chavez.
Most significantly, given that the company made the move from myriad systems to Databricks — at least, in part, for financial reasons — migrating certain operations to Databricks’ lakehouse led to a 70% reduction in cost compared to the way those operations were run previously.
Those cost savings led to buy-in from organizational executives. Buy-in subsequently resulted in expanded use of Databricks and, eventually, the complete overhaul of the organization’s data management and analytics operations to make the Databricks lakehouse its hub.
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“That’s what ended up snowballing and leading us to stick around to see how it goes [with Databricks],” Chavez said.
Now, though the Pacers aren’t yet benefiting from the organization’s migration to Databricks, the Fever are.
The WNBA uses a tracking system from Second Spectrum to provide its franchises with motion capture data that enables teams to analyze the movements of every player at every instant they’re on the court by essentially photographing each player 30 times per second.
Using that data in concert with the right platform, teams can go far beyond basic statistics — points, rebounds, assists, points in the paint and points from beyond the 3-point arc — that are rear-facing and only show what happened to ask and understand why something happened.
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The Fever loads its Second Spectrum data into Databricks’ lakehouse. With Databricks as its hub for data management and data engineering, the team is able ask why things are happening on the court and analyze motion capture data to reach conclusions.
For example, the team wanted to know not only how many touches near the basket it wasn’t converting into points but also why those possessions right in the paint weren’t resulting in baskets. Another question it had was how many possessions started with a steal but weren’t converted into fast-break points and why those possessions didn’t result in an easy basket.
“We had a lot of questions come through that were like, ‘Why are we the lowest in the league in this thing or in the bottom half of the league in some other specific area?’” Chavez said. “Now we can answer those questions.”
We had a lot of questions come through that were like, ‘Why are we the lowest in the league in this thing or in the bottom half of the league in some other specific area?’ Now we can answer those questions. Jared ChavezManager of data engineering and strategy, Pacers Sports & Entertainment
That’s just the start, he continued. The WNBA only began providing its teams with Second Spectrum data about two weeks before the start of the 2024 season. That gave the Fever and other franchises little time to develop models using the motion capture data to ask questions and analyze on-court performance.
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Beyond motion capture data, Databricks is the Fever’s system for feeding data to television and radio commentators to inform broadcasts and developing more traditional data assets, such as pregame and postgame reports for coaches and players, among other things.
Included is refined data such as missed opportunities for challenging bad calls, long 2-point shots that could have turned into 3-pointers had a player stepped back, and missed boxouts for rebounds as well as traditional statistics such points, rebounds, assists, turnovers and field goal percentage.
“The coaches are the heaviest users by a long shot,” Chavez said. “The questions that we’re seeing being asked and being relayed to my team are about that more nuanced stuff like, ‘Why is it that when teams drive the middle [of the lane], we’re not stopping it?’”
Databricks, meanwhile, plays a role in assisting the Fever and other customers with unique data management and analytics needs, working with them to train personnel on the platform as well as develop the data and machine learning tools that inform decisions, according to Booth.
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“Databricks offers … the power to rapidly build custom AI and machine learning models that can reason on sports teams’ unique data,” he said. “Sports teams typically seek quick and cost-effective data insights, often with lean teams. Databricks partners with franchises to decrease time to insight while empowering upskilling.”
Past problems
Pacers Sports & Entertainment realized immediate savings after switching its data operations to Databricks and has since used the lakehouse platform for multiple purposes, including better understanding the performance of the Fever. But all wasn’t perfect from the start, according to Chavez.
Databricks has long been good at enabling the use of analytics and machine learning to inform decisions, he noted. But from an engineering perspective, it wasn’t as strong in 2022 as some other platforms.
“The orchestrator was a far cry from most things on the market at the time — though, granted, it was their attempt to start getting headway,” Chavez said. “It was choppy for a bit.”
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A significant development that made engineering easier was the Databricks Unity Catalog, a data catalog that enables organizations to organize and govern their data.
“They have found their stride in the last year or year-and-a-half, especially on the engineering front,” Chavez said. “The tools continue to improve, and things are getting a lot better. But there are still some quality-of-life fixes that [Databricks needs to make] to catch up to platforms that have been around [longer].”
One remaining issue for many users is needing to use Apache Spark to work with Databricks’ lakehouse platform, he continued. For those who have used data warehouses in the past and are familiar with traditional databases, Databricks is completely foreign.
However, once users learn Spark, the benefits far outweigh the negatives associated with any initial struggles.
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“The learning curve and ceiling is astronomical for this platform, especially if you’re coming from a traditional background,” Chavez said. “You don’t have to know Spark to use Databricks. But if you don’t, you’re doing yourself a disservice because you can make this platform stupidly efficient and incredibly powerful.”
Databricks, meanwhile, has introduced tools over the past year aimed at making its platform easier to use, according to Bryan Saftler, global industry leader at Databricks.
They include a AI-powered tools that enable conversational interactions with data and free access to Databricks Academy, a set of training resources to help new users learn needed skills.
“Databricks has always been committed to democratizing access to more individuals across organizations whether they are technical nor not,” Saftler said. “To this effect, Databricks takes a multi-pronged approach.”
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Looking to the future
With problems mostly in the past for Pacers Sports and Entertainment, Databricks’ lakehouse is now the system underpinning most of the organization’s data operations, including its Salesforce ecosystem, security planning, marketing strategy and on-court analysis.
Looking ahead, the organization has ambitious plans for its future use of the vendor’s platform, including developing virtual reality models, Chavez said.
The organization captures location data as fans move throughout Gainbridge Field House and the property that surrounds it. Using that data, and by partnering with a research lab at Indiana University, Pacers Sports & Entertainment is planning to develop a virtual three-dimensional model of the Field House’s campus that shows the flow of traffic during events.
With the model, analysts will be able to see what fans are seeing to best strategize where to place advertising. They will also be able to observe where there are choke points in the flow of traffic to decide what gates to open when and where to place security personnel.
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Regarding on-court analysis, one application of virtual reality will be to enable the Fever to not only analyze the movement of players but also view their movement from different angles.
One example is if there is action taking place close to the basket where a bunch of bodies are crowded together and it’s difficult to tell exactly what’s taking place, virtual reality will enable an analyst to shift the viewing perspective. Using a simulation, the analyst will be able to essentially go inside the scrum to better see the action.
Another application of virtual reality will be to help the Fever better observe games from afar, such as action in overseas leagues.
Scouts can’t be everywhere, so the Fever are collecting data from over 50 competitions worldwide that will feed virtual reality models that enable the Fever to see more than just game tape as they look for players to add to their roster. The virtual reality models will also let coaches and front-office staff track current Fever players who spend winters playing overseas. The WNBA season is only from May to October, and the average salary of $102,000 is dramatically lower than the average NBA salary of $9.6 million, so players often spend winters in overseas leagues.
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“The goal is to simulate the game so when you say the team or a player is good at something or not good at something, we can see what it actually looks like,” Chavez said. “Now you can know what it looks like outside of just the stats.”
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
One of Tesla’s biggest downsides has always been the upfront cost of its electric vehicles versus gas models. The cheapest car it currently sells is $42,490 before subsidies, and the average starting price of its 2024 models is just over $63,000.
Tesla wrote in its that it’s making “preparations” to offer new vehicles with “more affordable models.” The EV maker’s cost of goods sold per vehicle also came down to “its lowest level ever” at $35,1000.
“Plans for new vehicles, including more affordable models, remain on track for start of production in the first half of 2025,” the report reads. “These vehicles will utilize aspects of the next generation platform as well as aspects of our current platforms and will be able to be produced on the same manufacturing lines as our current vehicle line-up.”
Tesla also says it plans to “begin launching” its cheaper EV models “in the first half of 2025.” That wording is still fairly loose, so there’s no guarantee that a new model will ship the same year.
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The other surprise in Tesla’s report came from the numbers. It turns out that despite setbacks like the and a federal investigation into its , Tesla had a fairly robust third quarter. The carmaker’s net income rose by 8 percent to $2.51 billion and sales rose by 2 percent year-over-year. The news also ends its four-quarter streak of .
Livewire, a marketing company, recently put out its new study that examined how the next generation of consumers expect brands to market to them. This “Next-Gen Attention Study” revealed that Gens Z and Alpha expect entirely new strategies from brands: Namely, they expect to be advertised to in-game. And not just in-game, either — they expect brands to meet them in-game authentically, with experiences. Livewire’s own platform offers insights on this “attention economy” and how brands can effectively engage with a young audience with changing needs and wants.
The study, which includes data from 1,801 gamers across the UK, U.S. and Australia, shows that 76% of Gen Alpha gamers surveyed expressed enjoyment for branded moments in game — which can include things such as custom-built worlds and experiences or cosmetics such as character skins — as opposed to 49% of millennials (54% of Gen Z gamers expressed the same enjoyment). Elsewhere in the report, 73% of Gen Alpha gamers said they preferred playable experiences over video ads, and 58% said they found immersion to be part of the enjoyment of gaming and in-game advertising.
GamesBeat spoke with Tom Simpson, Livewire’s CEO, about the changes in marketing across generations — and the disruption that the gaming era has brought: “You’ve got to show up in these gaming environments, which is sort of table stakes, isn’t it? You’ve got to put your message where the audience is. But actually that fundamental kind of communication experience and expectation changes the way that the next gen expects brands to talk to them, to engage with them, to show up for them, It’s completely different to how it been before, and just bringing your video over is not enough.”
The next generation’s expectations
Livewire recently launched in the North American market, bringing its “next-gen attention platform” to the new audience alongside Australia. Simpson said in a statement at the time of the expansion, “As we build the next-gen attention platform, we’re focused on harnessing the power of gaming to connect with Gen Z and Alpha, who are fundamentally reshaping the advertising landscape. Our approach is to create immersive, interactive experiences that capture and sustain their attention, positioning brands at the forefront of this dynamic new era.”
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The major difference that Gens Z and Alpha have over Millennials, says Simpson, is that they (and Alpha especially) expect brands to meet them where they are — and where they are is in games such as Fortnite and Roblox. Roblox recently opened its immersive ads experience to all brands, and Enrico D’Angelo, Roblox VP of economy told GamesBeat at the time that this was a great way for advertisers to connect with a “highly coveted audience like Gen Z.”
Simpson conceded that it may take some time for brands to fully understand the next-gen audience and how different they are. “Their heads are different because their heads were formed in this environment, and that because their heads were formed in this environment, the way that you got to talk to them is completely different to what to the way that you talked to them previously, and that that fundamental unit of marketing attention is being disrupted… It’s almost an expectation of the next-gen is that brands are there, and they see huge advantages in it, because brands often bring fun things for them to do.”
But while the audience is ready, Simpson notes that it’s also on games companies to work with advertisers. “Brands talk a particular language and have particular expectations. And those are things that the gaming industry, honestly, often just doesn’t understand and, historically, hasn’t cared about. But consumers are there and they want it, so you’ve got to evolve your offering… Expectations for quality of content are high. Consumers expect experiences that are amazing and inspirational and are as good as any other experience they might participate in. If you don’t make it as good as other games, they’ll go and play those other games.”
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New parental controls and insights are coming soon
Dear parent,
We’ve been working on a series of important changes that we’ll be making to your child’s account, ____________, next month.
About Roblox accounts with parent privileges
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Next month, we’re changing the way parents manage their child’s experience on Roblox by introducing Roblox accounts with parent privileges. After linking your account to your child’s, parents can view and update parental controls for their child all from their own device. Parents also get access to insights about their child’s Roblox usage, such as their daily screen time and on-platform friends.
Given these changes, starting next month, parents will no longer be able to set a parent PIN, use Account Restrictions, or receive account-related notifications to their parental email. Instead, you will need to use an account with parent privileges. Existing verified parental emails on child accounts will continue to be used for account recovery. Any settings previously set using a parent PIN will not change, but you will need an account with parent privileges to make updates going forward.
As always, if users are interested in an added layer of security on their account, you can set up 2-factor authentication.
Updated content maturity settings
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As we shared with the community in July, to help provide parents and users more clarity into the types of content available on Roblox, we’ll soon begin labeling experiences based on the type of content users can expect in an experience, rather than by age. Experience Guidelines will be renamed Content Labels, and you’ll be able to set limits on the type of content accessible to your child through the content maturity setting in parental controls.
New default settings for users under the age of 13
As part of Roblox’s commitment to safety, we are also updating certain default settings for our youngest users. Starting next month, users under the age of 13 will need parent permission to access certain chat features. Users under the age of 9 will also need parent permission to access experiences with content maturity “Moderate,” which may contain things like moderate violence or moderate crude humor.
Your child’s settings will be updated when they reach certain ages, if you and your child haven’t previously made changes to them. You and your child will be notified of these updates in advance.
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We will share more information on these setting updates when the changes go into effect next month.
Next steps
To continue receiving notifications about your child’s account related to spending or other important activity, you’ll need to set up a Roblox account with parent privileges and link to your child’s account. When these changes take effect, your child will receive a notification inviting them to add a linked parent account, and we’ll send you an email with instructions.
Since day one, Roblox has been committed to building safety features and tools into the design of our products. We will always continue to explore different ways to update our parental controls to make them even more useful for parents.
I felt like I opened a can of worms when I asked Samsung about its stance on AI photo editing at Galaxy Unpacked back in January. “There is no such thing as a real picture,” Patrick Chomet, Samsung’s Head of Customer Experience, told me at the time – a nihilism-tinged soundbite that, in fairness, came as part of a nuanced and perfectly valid philosophical commentary on the nature of photography (in the same interview, Chomet rightly talked up the importance of validating authenticity).
Marques Brownlee recently included Chomet’s quote in an X post highlighting the differing opinions of Samsung, Apple, and Google on this very subject. Still, ultimately, all of the major phone manufacturers are offering similar editing features (Magic Eraser, Clean Up, AI Eraser, and so on).
Qualcomm, for its part, acknowledges that AI photo editing is an exciting new frontier but also one fraught with awkward ethical implications. During a roundtable interview at Snapdragon Summit, the company’s Mobile Handset SVP, Chris Patrick, explained why he believes that AI photo editing “is not as simple as a real image and fake image.”
LOL “What is a photo?”Samsung: “Actually, there is no such thing as a real picture”Google: “authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond”Apple: “a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened” https://t.co/mwy3Yb9KaYSeptember 23, 2024
“It’s an interesting question, because the human brain is not digital,” the former engineer explained. “When you perceive the sunset outside, you don’t perceive the sunset absent of context. You know where you are. You know what you’re smelling. You know what you’re hearing, You know what you’re feeling. You know what a sunset looks like, right? All of that is part of how you perceive the space.”
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“So then, when we capture an image, should it just be the raw response from the sensor? Or is it right to include context in how that picture is created? I’m not an expert. I don’t have a PhD in this topic, but I do think it’s not as simple as a real image and fake image. I think context matters, and extracting the very best we can from the whole situation is an accurate reflection of what the eye and the brain do as well.”
When you perceive the sunset outside, you don’t perceive the sunset absent of context.Chris Patrick
“[However],” Patrick continued, “if there’s a picture of Rui [Guo, Honor CMO, also in attendance at the roundtable] and I on the moon, it should be very clear that that is not, in fact, a picture of Rui and I on the moon. That’s not correct – that’s manipulated.
“So, for us, it’s very clear that there has to be some mechanism to distinguish the other extreme – those manipulated images – for people. We’re building incredible technology together but we want to make sure that, in the end, it does not have a destructive impact, where people can no longer tell the difference between truth and fiction.”
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More AI is on the way
Honor CMO Ray Guo announcing the Honor Magic 7 Pro on stage at Snapdragon Summit (Image credit: Honor)
Honor CMO Rui Guo also attended the Snapdragon Summit roundtable, having just announced that the Honor Magic 7 Pro – slated for release in Europe next year – will launch with the industry’s first on-device generative AI portrait enhancement. So, is the company using AI to make portraits appear better than they actually are? Or is the aim to mimic real-life details that Honor’s hardware can’t capture on its own?
“On the one hand,” Guo explained, “we have to make sure that the photo itself is good by modern consumer standards. Everyone knows what [constitutes] a good and bad photo. But on the other hand, we definitely want to retain the authenticity of the photo. We’re not trying to Photoshop the photo for the consumer, right? We should give the authority to the users at end of the day.”
And that, I think, is the crux of the matter. Tools like Magic Eraser and Clean Up become ethically dubious when users – or, more worryingly, politicians – attempt to pass tampered images off as real, but as a means of occasionally removing strangers from family vacation photos, AI photo editing is, for many people, undeniably useful.
Neither Qualcomm nor Honor is forcing these tools onto their consumers – if you want to take a photo in the same way as you always have done, you still can. Rather, companies are giving users the freedom to choose how to capture moments that matter to them. Sure, it’s a can of worms, but as Qualcomm’s Chris Patrick noted, “it’s not as simple as real image and fake image.”
GenAI is plain vanilla, if you ask the folks at Google India. As the tech behemoth rolled out its ambitious ‘Google for India’ repertoire for their biggest and fastest growing market, there was one familar focus area where further announcements predictably came – Google’s onboarding of Indian languages as a digital tool. And, of course, artificial intelligence (AI) and lots of it.
Well in verse with the parent company’s efforts to take the pole position in AI advancements and grab the thunder back from that petulant upstart called OpenAI is evidently a dream up there on Mountain View (where Google’s global HQ is), and the trickle down effect was well evident in many of the announcements in India on Thursday – Google’s Gemini AI can now go ‘Live’, with real time conversation by adapting to the user. The ‘Gemini Live’ feature is available in 8 Indian languages, besides English.
Google’s next-generation AI project called Astra is at the core of it, and while it is awaited, the slow rollout of its features, the company hopes, will be transformational. For now, there is already AI Overviews expected in Telugu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi in the coming days, while ‘ask with video’ feature in Search also debuted, starting with English.
With image-based search on Maps, Gemini summarising Google reviews to save time, real-time weather and traffic updates on Maps, Google’s attempt is to make AI work for daily chores, beside the focus on Indian languages to take its tech evangelism to the hinterland.
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Another path-breaking endeavour has been in the field of healthcare. Not only is the company tying up with the government’s Ayushman Bharat project to roll out the issuance of the ABHA health ID through Google wallets soon, its iCALL feature whereby a user can call and speak to a health professional live has been expanded to more vernacular languages. And perhaps incredibly, its AI tools are now evolved enough to detect eye issues, TB and even cancer. For instance, TB could apparently be detected through just an audio sample analysis of a person’s sound!
Google also announced a spate of partnerships, right from Adani and CleanMax (for clean energy projects) to Muthoot (for online loan-against-gold) to Glance (skilling).
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are some of the best periods to snag yourself a new smartwatch, especially if you’ve been waiting a while before upgrading. While the actual sales day might be a little while off, there are already a lot of great early Black Friday deals that you can take advantage of, including on some of the best smartwatches on the market. To that end, we’ve collected some of our favorite early deals for you below, although it’s also worth keeping an eye on our larger smartwatch deals roundup as well.
While most smartwatches focus on the smartwatch part, the Garmin Forerunner 55 is made for runners who want to keep track of their overall fitness and their runs. It comes with GPS tracking in the three major systems, has a whole suite of sensors such as heart rate and Vo2 Max, and comes with a very solid $30 discount off the $200 price tag.
The Samsung Galaxy Watch6 Classic is easily one of the best Android phones on the market. In fact, when our senior mobile writer Andy Boxall got his hands on it, he felt that “the Galaxy Watch 6 Classic has superb styling, all-day comfort, comprehensive health tracking, and more. It’s the smartwatch to buy for your Android phone.” Even better, this deal lets you snag it for a substantial 33% discount.
For those who are in the Apple ecosystem, the Apple Watch Series 9 is probably one of the best and most affordable options, even more so with this impressive $100 discount. The conclusion our senior mobile writer came to when reviewing it was “The Apple Watch Series 9’s 24/7 comfort, extensive features, fast performance, and seamless integration with the iPhone make it a must-buy.”
If you’re just as interested in tracking your fitness as having a smartwatch, the Garmin Venu 3S GPS does a great job of balancing both, and since it comes from Garmin, you know that fitness tracking is top notch. Between the GPS coverage, Sleep Coach and Body Battery, you’ll have all the stats you need to refine your fitness journey, plus the $50 discount isn’t too bad either!
If you’re in the Apple ecosystem and truly want the best experience money can buy, then you’ll want this Apple Watch Ultra 2 GPS deal that knocks $119 off the price tag. Our senior mobile reviewer feels that it has “an outstanding design, great software, and some very welcome upgrades, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is tough to beat.”
There are a lot of options out there for smartwatches, but for the most part, there are generally three big players on the market: Apple, Samsung, and Garmin. Apple Watches are made specifically for the Apple ecosystem, and if you’re in it, then you’ll want to go with one of those, with your main options being the Watch Series 9 for a good budget-friendly option, the Ultra Watch 2 for the best, and the Series 10 for something in the middle. We actually have a great breakdown of the Apple Watch Series 9 vs. Ultra 2, so be sure to check that out before taking the plunge.
On the other hand, Samsung is the go-to smartwatch maker for Android, and it generally has two options every generation: a standard model and a pro or classic model with a bezel that you can turn to control the watch. Samsung does have a high-end option in the form of the Galaxy Watch Ultra, but it borrows, almost to a comical extent, from the Apple Watch Ultra.
Finally, Garmin is the brand you go for if you want something more about fitness tracking than a smartwatch. It has a wide range of products, but the Forerunner lineup is great for runners, while the Venu is a great option for those who want a good balance between smartwatch and fitness tracker.
With many decades of combined experience as reviewers and deal hunters, we have a very good sense of what watches offer the best offers and prices. Of course, we don’t just rely on our own instincts, but we also put in a lot of legwork to make sure you’re getting the best deals you can for any single smartwatch we put up here. We also have our own set of tools that we can fall back on to look at things such as historical pricing. When you put all that together, you get suggestions that offer you the best bang for your buck so that you can buy with confidence.
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