Hacker News Reader

Comment by drinchev | Hacker News Reader

I would assume sleep tracking would never be a feature. You need to charge your Apple Watch every night, so that's off the limit. I use Fitbit Flex 2 to track my sleep and I wear them both during the day, however during the night only Flex 2 stays on one of my wrists.

Unfortunately Fitbit decided to discontinue the display-less flex 2 and now I'm a bit confused on what to do next.

View on HN

Apple is rumoured to be working on sleep tracking. Of course it already exists by third parties: I use SleepWatch.

I thought the charging thing would be deadly for my use of it, but it is so much less of a thing than I imagined it would be. Firstly, sleep tracking uses surprisingly little battery. Often I'll see less than an 8% drop over night. Additionally I just drop it on the charger in the morning while doing my morning routines and that gets it quickly to 100%. Very occasionally I do a short burst in the evening.

I never thought it would be worth that sort of hassle, but it is a thousand fold. I send and receive messages from the watch. Answer calls. Look up things. Use the activity track. Use it to control media. It is my alarm clock. With the recent betas of 6.0 the usability has improved dramatically -- before all sorts of operations would yield "I can't do that" sorts of responses, whereas now I'm getting just brilliant results.

I was a naysayer of the thing (I strongly felt that if you couldn't go days without recharging it was a dud). The health features got me to give a shot, and I am a very strong believer now. It is an absolutely wonderful device.

I’ve been using mine for sleep tracking for years?

My routine is to charge my Apple Watch when I come back from work and put it back on before I go to sleep.

Or is there some other sleep related feature that requires a sensor other than HR that I’m not aware about?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com