Updated on September 9, 2020 at 12:23 am

Galaxy Smartwatch. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Now that I have a pile (10 to be exact) of smartwatches on my desk to test, this particular project should be interesting as the attack surface area is a bit more limited than previous research projects on IoT devices.

Of course a smartwatch research project without the Apple Watch included would be a sad project indeed. So I’ll be camping in San Francisco with a buddy of mine to try and grab one on launch day while I’m out there for the RSA Conference.

I discovered while trying to determine which products to test that smartwatches can be divided in essentially three groups:

  • “Smart”watches (maybe not so smart) that essentially just echo notifications and such from a smartphone and do little to nothing on their own.
  • Hybrids that are a mix of traditional and “smart” technology. Some do a few things on their own like tracking steps which they feed back to their mobile application, but they essentially look and feel like a traditional time piece.
  • And then there are the smartwatches that not only echo notifications from your smartphone, but they collect information on their own and feed that back to their mobile application. They collect data such as heart rate, steps, distance, calories burned, etc. While a couple of the watches utilize WiFi, most utilize Bluetooth as their communication method. I’ll be putting my Ubertooth One to work pretty heavily on this project.

Anyway, research report should be out this month.