Enlarge / From left to right: Apple Watch Ultra, Shinola Bronze Monster, Oura Ring, Withings Scanwatch Horizon, a traditional ring, and Garmin Epix Gen 2. (credit: Chuong Nguyen)

Everyday carry enthusiasts typically face a conundrum when it comes to choosing between a smartwatch with all the benefits of modern wrist-worn tech or giving up tracking their health metrics in exchange for classic, mechanical watches. There are a few people who wear a regular timepiece on one wrist and a smartwatch on the other, but those drawbacks are obvious.

Fortunately, there's a growing selection of wearables that offer the tracking power of an Apple watch without taking up space on your wrist. These allow you to wear a mechanical watch for timekeeping while a health-tracking device feeds data to your phone. If you care about sleep metrics, step counts, heart and respiration rates, blood oxygen levels and still want to wear your mechanical watch, we’ve found three great wearable solutions for you.

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Amazon is discontinuing its Halo project , including the Band and View fitness trackers and the Rise bedside sleep tracker, making the devices useless on August 1. Amid the company's largest-ever wave of layoffs and reports that even the popular Alexa voice assistant has failed to bring in money, this wasn't surprising. It's still sad, though, to realize that countless devices will become obsolete and at huge risk of becoming e-waste (despite Amazon telling customers to recycle devices through its recycling programs, all costs covered).

But perhaps it's just as well, because a report from The Verge today claims to peer into Halo's last attempts at survival. And the Halo that Amazon reportedly tried to realize is one we're happy not to encounter.

Halo reportedly creeped out its own creators

Reported plans for Halo could have pushed products to gather more data on how users exercise in order to provide virtual rewards, to offer recommendations, and to track performance. However, the features Amazon is said to have explored sound potentially invasive, collecting uniquely personal data.

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This time of year is often weird tech concept season—companies show us gadgets that they've been tinkering with and may or may not sell. Chinese smartphone maker Oppo is getting started ahead of CES with an intriguing smart health tracker meant for the whole family. Like fitness trackers and smartwatches, Oppo's OHealth H1 family health monitor uses sensors to track various health stats. But unlike those wearables, the H1 prototype is meant to be held in your hand—or to the forehead, chest, or back—when taking readings.

Oppo shared a video today demonstrating this "concept prototype" as part of its fourth annual Inno Day event, where the company has previously shown confirmed products , like this year's Bluetooth audio system-on-a-chip , and its concepts . The event has included in-person attendance in the past, but this year’s event looks like it was just a video shared online Although only a concept, Oppo's calling the H1 the first product from its "smart healthcare sub-brand" launched this year, OHealth.

The H1 uses sensors and algorithms to provide ECG, heart rate, blood oxygen, and body temperature readings. It also claims to be able to track sleep, and through skin contact, Oppo says the H1 can perform heart and lung auscultation. Oppo said readings could be taken simultaneously or one at a time for better accuracy.

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Today, Fitbit announced the availability of three new fitness trackers: the Inspire 3 , Versa 4 , and Sense 2 . All successors to previous-generation devices, the three run the gamut from Fitbit’s highest-equipped to most basic fitness wearables.

“Basic” is a relative term among fitness trackers, as they all continuously edge closer to full-blown smartwatch functionality. The Inspire 3, in particular, adds blood oxygen monitoring during sleep and a full-color AMOLED touchscreen to the entry-level tracker, which already can receive phone alerts, like texts, calls, and app notifications. Setting the display to the optional “always on” setting takes battery life estimates down from 10 days to only three, which is much more in line with full-featured smartwatches, though less than Fitbit’s Sense and Versa watches.

By contrast, the Sense 2 and Versa 4 are the two most-capable trackers Fitbit offers. They’re both rated for about six days of use (without the always-on-display enabled) and now feature fast-charging capability that Fitbit claims can give you a day of battery life from only 12 minutes of charging.

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Broadly speaking, recommending an Apple Watch is simple: If you use an iPhone and want a smartwatch, staying in-house with Apple will usually be your best bet.

But there are several Apple Watches on the market right now. The introduction of the Apple Watch Series 7 in September 2021 brought Apple's lifetime total to nine, with the company currently offering three models in stores: the Series 7, SE, and Series 3. Among those, there are multiple variants that differ in size, connectivity, design, and price.

Then there are older-but-still-updated generations you can dig up from third-party retailers like Best Buy and Amazon, as well as options to buy refurbished devices. Everyone has different needs, and you may be able to find an Apple Watch that’s less expensive and more attuned to your desires by going these routes.