The season's best smartwatches revealed

Commercials for smartwatches are everywhere this holiday season.

Watches of all shapes, sizes and prices offer to count your steps, check your heart rate, and display all your notifications conveniently on your wrist. And of course they tell time, too.

Consumer Reports has rated more than a dozen watches, putting them through a variety of tests.

The lab checks the durability of the cover glass by scratching it with picks of increasing hardness.

Consumer Reports tests heart-rate accuracy by comparing watches to its highest-rated heart-rate monitor.

And testers assess water resistance by putting watches in this pressurized tank. The $175 Sony SmartWatch 3 failed this test and landed at the bottom of Consumer Reports' ratings.

At the top of the ratings - the Apple Watch, which starts at $550

"The face doesn't scratch very easily. And Apple Watch has caught up with Android Wear and Pebble to allow apps to be developed by third parties," says Consumer Reports' Kerry Allen.

That means plenty of options like Fantastical, a calendar app, and OmniFocus, a personal-organizer app.

A good, less expensive choice - the $130 Asus ZenWatch 2. Unlike Apple, you can use it with a phone that runs on iOS or Android.

Another gift option? The $350 Samsung Gear S2, which offers 3G so you don't have to stay tethered to your phone to receive calls and notifications.

Battery life is a big issue for smartwatch users. So it's good to know that all of the smartwatches Consumer Reports recommends lasted at least a day.