The quest for a simple smartwatch
binarymoon.co.uk
binarymoon.co.uk
God I hate closed down hardware. I don't actually care if the battery life gets shorter because I take the damn thing off every day to shower anyway, and the time it stays off is more than enough to charge it every day if I had to.
But what really annoys me is that the choice is just made for me.
I'm never buying a device with closed firmware, unreplaceable batteries, etc, ever again. It's a complete waste of money in terms of durability and I'm sick of not really owning the devices I pay out the nose for and that fact making them strictly less capable.
The LCD screen meant it was readable in any light and also had fantastic battery life.
I have yet to see another smartwatch do what they did, which is a bit baffling to me. Watchy came close, being fully programmable with an e-ink screen, but the bulk of the housing was atrocious.
I'm guessing pebble watches didn't geolocate you, and report your position, and probably didn't record everything said around you then "anonymize" it, so it was likely deemed useless by VCs, and thus died?
No wonder there's no replacement!
To all VCs, my startup sells geolocated tools, and also orders screws and nails, automatically, by selling special nails, with an rfid tag build in!
(next day? 1B buyout)
If there is demand, the product will succeed. See: all the companies that came from bootstrapped startups.
If there is no demand, no amount of VC money will make a successful company. See: Magic Leap.
There are two schools of thought over this: they just don't care so it's fine or the wool has been pulled over their eyes.
The backlash from industry against laws that are largely just intended to inform consumers and keep them in the loop (like GDPR) kind of hints that it's not the former.
Consumers are especially bad at pricing risk. Just because they made a decision doesn't mean that they walked into those risks with open eyes.
Arguably, Pebble was an example of this. They initially presented the smartwatch as a productivity tool and many users loved it. But the productivity market was much smaller than the fitness market so they kept adding fitness related features. This eventually enabled them to be bought out by Fitbit (for a good exit) who saw no further use in the brand and killed it.
Another example is planned obsolescence: there's very little money in producing a product that has few returning customers because it continues to work fine for decades.
Saying "consumers" or "demand" or "your wallet" implies a level of agency and democratic control that isn't really there in practice. Consumers don't decide product success, profit and growth does. And consumers certainly don't get to make any direct decisions, they just get to pick through what has already been preselected for them.
Yes, a lot of "new"/"modern" companies that have shiny balance sheets with the colour black used, and not red, follow as you attribe. But there are plenty whom do not.
Money decides hardware success. It may not come from a VC, but it's always the deciding factor.
You can still get transflective displays on Garmin fitness/hiking watches. They're great, because they allow for always-on display with more than a month of battery life. Some of their new consumer products are OLED that wake up when you turn your wrist, but the core audience really likes the transflective displays.
I do might the Timeline UI, it still is in my opinion the pinnacle of what a smartwatch OS should aim for. It focused to keep the core function of a watch (time and time-related events) at the top.
I also would love to tinker with the fw and be able to service parts. But providing each of those features is a tradeoff. The fw is primarily a cultural issue, but to some extent also a support one. I think that's where I would push harder - rather than the hw aspect. Replaceable batteries are either quite specific or incur a substantial space penalty (are any widely-available button cells rechargable?)
And apparently rechargable button cells do exist based on a quick google search, though i have no idea how widely available they are. But again, it's just an engineering problem that can be solved should the right people put their minds to it. I can't really design hardware, but I did write the firmware for a two man startup at one point, designing custom electronics for people with too much money. We always made the source available to the customer and made our stuff USB or JTAG programmable. Not that any of them actually cared, but we did!
As for size, I never thought it was too small. In fact, I would say it's a perfect size for my wrist.
However I don't have anything on that screen by default to extend battery life closer to a month.
Two more features I highly appreciate:
- I don't think I could go back to an alarm on my phone. Smart wakeup really works wonderfully.
- Even when battery's at 0%, basic functionality (telling time, counting steps) still works for like a week or two.
But I find it almost completely useless for reading notifications from my phone. The small screen + no way to recall notifications if you don't watch the whole thing scroll past when it originally comes in are very frustrating. Plus it's very annoying that despite having users asking for this for years they have not implemented a "find my phone" feature.
Very non-tech. Only uses an iPhone and an Apple watch. No laptop or tablet/iPad.
Gets a surprisingly large quantity of things done via her phone.
My phone is an Android. She shared 2 things her iPhone can do that I don't think my phone (OnePlus 7 pro) and watch (Amazfit T-Rex 2) combination can do:
- she can always find out where she parked her car
- her watch buzzes to warn her if she leaves her keys or phone behind in her car. I think she has some airtag type of thing in her keyring.
Surprised that Android phone + watch combination doesn't already natively offer these features (with easy discoverability).
Disclosure: I actually happen to kno exactly how this feature works, as I added support for iBeacons in apps for iOS and Android in one of our projects. Not for the functionality described above, but for waking the app once a user walks to a proximity of a beacon. My office beacon is laying at a distance of less than 1meter from me right now.
If I leave an airtag in my car, I will always know where it is because my phone is constantly looking for the BT signal.
So I don’t get a notification when I leave my iPad at home, but I do whenever I leave it at work, for example.
But a lot of people apparently want a single "super" app that does everything. Musk was right about that- we're all going to see a Western WeChat emerge. All hail integration.
Apple will probably be the one creating something like a "super ecosystem", but reserved for Apple users of course.
I can't imagine any other company pulling it off. Amazon could but its reputation seems so bad lately that I doubt people would jump in. So I find it incredibly hard to believe that a true "Western WeChat" could emerge any time soon.
I seldom carry a phone around with me, and my Apple Watch does every thing I need while outside the house.
The only other thing the watch is missing is the ability to connect to bluetooth in my car, so if I have left my phone behind I can still answer calls or listen to music. I'm sure this is intentionally crippled as it starts the pairing process then fails - tried in several cars with different makes of head unit.
On a related note, I've had significant issues trying to play music through airpods through the watch. I can get it to connect, and it plays a few seconds of music, then goes silent. The screen still indicates its playing. Very frustrating.
You can do almost anything from it that doesn't require a larger screen or a keyboard, and the kinds of activities the larger screen enables tend to mostly just waste your time. Take a typical 2007 "dumb" phone - the watch screen is roughly that size.
It becomes awkward when you need to find something on the web (you can't even access the browser directly, you need to ask Siri and work with a popup), but I was mildly successful following a recipe when cooking. It's plain better than a phone at many other common tasks (following directions, checking the weather, paying for stuff, telling time, etc).
The biggest impact it had is that I no longer feel compelled to reach for my phone in most situations. It's not just that it saves 5-10 seconds here and there: the context switch is brief enough that I can remain focused on whatever I was doing.
(inb4 just turn off notifications, yes I am already very picky about what is allowed to distract me.)
The (literal and figurative) friction of dragging my phone out of my pocket when I receive a call or text or other alert is gone, and I love it.
Yeah. To me VP feels like carrying a boombox on your shoulder, when all you actually need are AirPods.
For the parked car trick I would guess you'd do something like set up a trigger that fires when your phone or watch disconnect from your car's Bluetooth and drops a notification with your GPS location that you would tap on your way back to the car to have it pull up in Google Maps.
I have a similar task set up that automatically switches on my wireguard tunnel as soon as home Wi-Fi signal is below a certain strength for more than 10 seconds (the implication being that I am departing not only the house but also the immediate area outside where my Wi-Fi still operates). As a fairly unsophisticated Tasker user I was able to cobble this together in about 2 hours by starting from a template that did something similar, including the testing necessary to confirm where the cutoff dB should be.
I wanted a long battery life (e-ink would work) minimal watch with health tracking only. In the end I just chose the Apple Watch SE, switched off all phone & message notifications and made recharging part of my daily routine. It’s easier to adapt than find the perfect device and I’ve found many useful features on the SE that I wouldn’t have chosen on my custom smart watch.
My desired features are basically yours, plus notifications. I've found the Amazfit Bip to just about fit the bill. I wish it had a bit more health tracking, but the ~month of battery life makes up for it. Watches with batteries that last a week are what confuse me; it's too regular to forget about, and too infrequent to easily remember. I could probably get used to a daily charge though.
The big problem is all the menus are cluttered with buttons for features that I will never use. I'm sure every feature has someone who will use it; but I certainly won't.
(It's not like it's 1995 and half the fun of a brand new computer is figuring out how to use it.)
Probably the best way to solve the problem is to make it easier to disable (or ignore) most of the features.
But I'm not sure it's what OP is after. The requirements are:
> Phone notifications (so I don’t miss calls/ texts)
> Step counting
> A long battery life
Bangle.js doesn't connect to your phone at all, so you won't get any phone notifications. I don't personally use step counting, but when I have tried it I found it didn't work very well. Maybe that's just me.
The battery life depends a lot on what you're doing. In particular, clock faces that show seconds (i.e. have to wake up the CPU every second) drain the battery faster than clock faces that only go down to minutes. It still easily lasts longer than a day, which is good enough for me. I just charge mine overnight.
Apparently you can actually connect it to phone notifications using gadgetbridge[0] but I didn't have much success when I tried it. The BLE was a little flaky at the best of times (pairing to a PC for programming failed more often than I'd like).
idk if Bangle1 strap is different but (don't remember exact measurement) you can put any standard watch strap with a normal strap pin on it. I replaced the broken stock strap with a nylon one off the net and it's great.
[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.espruino.gadgetbridge.ba...
I love my Bangle.js 2, and have written my own watch face for it.
I charge weekly, after one week the battery is usually at ~50% with my usual usage. Obviously with GPS on the battery empties much faster, without any notifications etc the battery can hold multiple weeks.
I use a Garmin smartwatch. One of the surprising things about Garmin is that they don't have a proper app store. They have an app where you can load apps into your watch, but it's rather crippled by having no payment system.
That would be fine if all the apps are free, but they're not: a lot of the prettier watch faces (for example) expect cash - but there's no easy way to pay for them. I recently added a watch face which stopped working after a few days because the author wanted cash sent through some dubious third party website.
I presume they do this to avoid issues with Android / Apple rules about payment, but it's a poor experience.
Garmin conducts themselves really well, too. They make good stuff and do little to lock it down: you don't have to use their cloud shit if you don't want (I do use it and like it), they created a peripheral standard in ANT+ that became widely adopted, without actually privileging their own stuff, etc.
I wear my Garmin all day, and charge it every other week. Physical buttons are a game changer, and the activity tracking software feels like it was made by someone that actually uses it.
Are you talking about Garmin Express?
If so, a "little clunky" would be a massive understatement based on my experience...
I love my Garmin watch, but I wish the Garmin software was lot more...usable.
And battery life...I can put it in low power mode and it just works as a watch until I want to record an activity. And it has power for ~a month that way.
The said they'd replace it for free and gave me a label to download (great!) However, I was travelling and the label wasn't valid for where I was. I asked if I could send it myself or get the label re-allocated when I got back (it had a time limit).
We then exchanged a dozen or so emails where Garmin CS kept ignoring my suggestions and giving me stupid instructions (terrible) until we eventually agreed they'd give me another label when I got back (ok).
I got back home and requested another label. CS demanded payment equivalent to the cost of a new watch (terrible!) I repeatedly asked why they were suddenly asking for payment when they'd previously offered it for free and they kept ignoring the question (argh!)
I'd have been much less annoyed if they'd just said up front that it was out of warranty, as then I wouldn't have wasted weeks and dozens of emails.
I eventually noticed that the original label still seemed to be valid, so I took up their original offer, sent my watch off and got an apparently new replacement within a day or two (great! I think.)
So, very mixed views! It's a lot like trying to write a Garmin app. They've got some nice API documentation (with a tutorial) but very incomplete as soon as you try to do something non-trivial.
Looking at the Garmin specs, the two-week battery life is sans-GPS. With GPS enabled the battery life is the same as the Apple Watch.
Apple Watch lasts hours with active GPS tracking while Garmin will last for a day (or even several days when in so-called Expedition mode).
Nothing from Apple comes close to Garmin's battery life at same usage.
Although the two are not directly comparable of course, when is more of a fitness watch, the other is a general smart watch with fitness functionality.
Apple said their GOAL was 18 hours (mixed usage). Good grief.
It really introduced me to a new level of battery anxiety. I'm extremely satisfied with my garmin which lasts a week+ per charge.
There are quite a few settings that you can tweak as well, depending on the model of watch. My Descent has most things turned on during the day, but switches most off automatically using a power-save mode configured to match the "sleep" time on my phone. I think if it's set to minimum power usage, it's closer to a couple months. (Estimated battery time is typically shown in the watch face.)
Just get one without a screen. Iirc there are a bunch of G SHOCK digital watches that can show phone notifications. You can even get solar for a never ending battery life
The OS is open source. The finish is good (though not high end materials but still water proofed), runs for multiple days and does phone notifications just fine.
It is very bare bones though.
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Anyone wanna buy a pinetime?
I'm selling. Free (+shipping from NL/DE/BE) if you have a good use for it and send me an update after a few weeks or so ^^. I wanted a heartbeat tracker but it didn't work at all for me (known software issue, I should have done more research before). I've got one open dev kit and one sealed one, but need to check which one I gave away already. Email in profile
I then moved my interest to good old plain watches. Digital, mechanical, self-winding, manual-winding, hacking seconds, chronographs, divers, all that. It's a rich, complex, and beautiful world.
They can get as expensive or as affordable as you want, but for the price of one expensive smart watch you can get quite a nice collection of watches that you can combine with different styles of life and fashion.
I ended up going the other direction, I got an apple watch and just sucked it up and accepted that I'll toss it on the charger every morning. It has a lot of really good features (I can approve okta logins and get authy codes from my wrist, I can check weather and scroll around to browse the forecast, things like that).
I think there are two branches at this point post-pebble. You either get something that augments your phone with a couple benefits over a traditional watch, or you get something like Apple Watch that does many of the things your phone can do, saving you from spending time on the big screen.
For me there's strong value to the latter that makes up for the battery downsides: the powerful-but-focused app functionality means I can accomplish a task without getting pulled into other things. On a phone I find it all too easy to check the weather then start checking notifications and get sucked into news or something.
Less is more.
Literally wearing a fully functional Pebble Time as I write this. I also have a Pebble Time Steel (not wearing currently) also fully operational.
I hope the author realizes that Amazfit is owned by Huami which is a sister/sibling company of Xiaomi. And as of 2021 at least, they were the 3rd largest smartwatch maker after Apple and Samsung.[1] I'd expect their build quality to be at least quite decent on average, and my n=1 $60 Amazfit Bip is probably 4 years old now with absolutely no issues.
> I’m aware that there are cheaper alternatives out there like the Amazfit range but these watches were either too complex, or too basic, there was no middle ground.
AFAIK nearly all the fancier options can be turned off from the app. And apart from a very few models with (I think) 8 segment displays all of them satisfy the author's criteria of notifications + other features.
I sometimes wish Amazfit would advertise more because every "I want a simple smartwatch!" discussion ends up with "Aah I wish Pebble existed" comments, folks paying $$$ for Garmins/Fitbits and people bemoaning the battery life on Apple/Samsung watches. Just get an Amazfit Bip (original or S).
1 - https://www.gizmochina.com/2021/11/30/amazfit-becomes-third-...
For some this association might be offputting. My current phone is by Xiaomi, as was the previous one, but my next won't be. There is a pile of stuff you can't (easily) uninstall that keeps trying to run and wants all sorts of odd perms for their task, heck the default clock on this device wanted location access before letting me set an alarm! (I just installed a different app), and they get good battery life scores by being _very_ aggressive about killing apps which is a pain for some things you might want to keep running in the background.
Can these watches be used without the company's own cloud stuff, and/or an advert laden app, or is that forced on you like like the inexpensive (and sometimes not so inexpensive!) home cameras from Yi and similar manufacturers?
> I'd expect their build quality to be at least quite decent on average,
That is certainly true with the phones I've used. The hardware seems as solid as similar (usually more expensive) devices, including the cameras being pretty decent.
However, I’d not really recommend it, and probably wouldn’t buy it again, given the choice:
- very slow and buggy sync, which often takes a minute or longer to sync a day’s activity when sitting next to the phone running the Fitbit app in the foreground, and/or often fails. (This is the sort of crap that makes me appreciate e.g. AirPods just working)
- poor ability (and worse, to my memory, than very early Fitbits) to accurately determine the start and end of sleeping. Given sleep tracking is one of its standout features, this is very disappointing.
- probably, overly-sensitive sleeping tracking suggesting I wake multiple times in a (good) night, which other data would suggest isn’t the case.
- the ‘raise wrist to turn screen on’ feature almost never works. Not the end of the world because I’m used to double-tapping it instead, but another example of bad coding/QA.
- weird inaccuracies/oversights in exercise tracking. For example, it will correctly figure out that the recent two-hour block of raised heart rate was a bike ride, but will simultaneously credit me with 15000 steps during that time, presumably due to the vibrations from riding the bike, but not putting 2+2 together.
Since it can't even see the difference between being awake and sleeping, I absolutely don't trust anything it says about the amount of time I spend in each sleep phase.
Like MP3 players 10-20 years ago, I suspect there's "a market" for a simple smartwatch, but not a very profitable market. So your choice will be the expensive Apple version (and maybe a couple of other luxury brands) or the basic no-name Chinese manufacturer version.
Agreed. My Amazfit Bip does everything the blog's author was looking for, including *40,000* watch faces. I paid $60 five years ago, then $20 for a used one 2.5 years ago after the first one fell prey to a known design flaw (that has since been fixed, by my understanding). The darn thing even functions as a Bluetooth heartrate sensor for running! <https://np.reddit.com/r/amazfit/comments/8t1gsp/six_weeks_wi...>
>Like MP3 players 10-20 years ago, I suspect there's "a market" for a simple smartwatch, but not a very profitable market. So your choice will be the expensive Apple version (and maybe a couple of other luxury brands) or the basic no-name Chinese manufacturer version.
I think my Bip is superior to Apple Watch. The latter does many things that Bip does not, but Bip has the insuperable advantage of three full weeks of battery life. I have zero, zilch, zip desire to recharge a watch every day!
I'm not sure if this is available for other platforms. If not, there's money to be made, especially if you can add some kind of auto mute feature.
[0]: https://sl8.ch/
I remember I got one of the early t-touch watches in early 2000, that has to be as simple as they get yet so infinitely cool: https://www.tissotwatches.com/en-en/men/categories/t-touch.h...
I'm sold on simple smartwatches that only require an e-ink (or whatever it is) screen because they hold a charge for well over a month and still do everything I need from them. Namely show notifications, who's calling, who's messaging, read messages, control music, and some other stuff that is less important.
The app has also improved over the years, even though I'm still pretty sure they sell all my personal data to any bidder. Of course I'd prefer a more self hosted or open approach.
But it's good enough. Currently I'm using a Machine, don't remember the name of the one before it but it was similar, slightly smaller.
I also ended up stumbling on https://github.com/lupyuen/pinetime-rust-mynewt which got me interested in rust which i'm using as a daily driver now and have fully ingested the rusty kool-aid
Besides the clock (retro analog dial with the numbers), and the date, the only Complication on the first watch face is the Timer. The Timer is the most productive tool that I have found. It is way easier to quickly set the timer for everything than use my brain for remembering the short-term events - such as making tea just before a meeting, boiling eggs, allowance time to people coming late to meetings, grocery aisle walks, and many other things.
I also have a second Watch Face used only when traveling outside of the country, a travel specific data and 2-3 complications.
I don't do phone calls (except a few allowed numbers), no notifications except a few, such as calendar and health app.
So, it is the simplest yet good Smartwatch for me. Sometimes, the battery dies - so, be it - the intermittent charging in between hand-washes, baths, washroom breaks, early morning, and during the wind-down routines are good enough to go round the clock.
It's still much better than charging your watch every night/week/month. And I really like the minimal functionality it offers.
It's years old by now but I still get well over a week of battery life, if I don't use GPS. It tracks my sleep, runs, walks and cycles automatically. It mirrors my notifications, including 2fa codes sent via email, sms or app. It finds my phone. It can keep my phone unlocked as long as it's nearby. It's waterproof at depths where I'll be dead. It has a stopwatch and a countdown timer (like any decent watch should). Everything is controlled with a few buttons (no touchscreen, so no accidental swipes or poor usability when wet).
I got the one with the sapphire lens, expensive as ffff at the time, but it's completely perfect after a few accidental scrapes on concrete.
I've never been a fan of things on my wrist, but I have a problem of missing calls from my wife when my phone is on vibrate. I don't need a screen, just something that is close enough to my body to always vibrate noticeably without being uncomfortable.
Havent found anything like that since that Sony one
I do like the look of the "hybrid" watches that have physical hands.
I tested out and threw out smart watches. They are not for me. I love the freedom of a €125 dumb rugged square G Shock.
My problem with the g shock line is it’s so expansive and hard to figure out which does what.
The g shock website doesn’t allow you to filter by phone notifications…
If I were a watch person I would definitely be a G-Shock person. I bought one for a brother more than 20 years ago when he joined the Army and needed a durable watch. His model charges by solar and syncs to local time via radio I think. No matter where he has traveled he always had the correct time. He told me that the watch has never had a problem and that he wouldn't consider "upgrading" to a smart watch which would tie him to a charger.
Casio makes excellent watches and their entry into the smart watch domain should be interesting. I bought the Garmin because of the battery life, feature set, and reliability and because I have used Garmin GPS devices and know them to be excellent devices. Casio has a similar reputation for quality and so they should be on anyone's short list of devices to consider.
It takes ages to sync, and, adding insult to injury, every time the app is updated, it syncs the AGPS, which is a very slow operation.
The on-demand screen backlighting is unreliable (one needs to do a very exaggerated arm twist to ensure it works).
But worse of all, when the Bluetooth connection breaks, one receives no notifications, which is a very serious problem for users relying on a smartwatch to be notified when they're at physical distance from their phone.
There are other UX problems (e.g. alarms can be set only via app), but those are secondary compared to the above).
It's a shame, because even if it's not really a smartwatch, it could perfectly fit the bill of "minimal, long-running smartwatch" (as a matter of fact, it fits the requirements of the author).
He said than he have only tree requirements: Phone notifications, step counting & long battery life. But then faced with a Casio he said "Casio watches showed promise, but their limited notifications and unattractive styling didn’t meet my preferences for a more elegant design"...
His final choice may have been more because of the "elegant design" than his initial requirements. He confirm it more or less because he even "had to disable a ton of fitness tracking features that I’ll never use just so that I could do the things I wanted."
On my watch I'd only like notifications about meeting reminders, scheduled reminders, and possibly google maps notifications (directions) while biking. I don't want my watch to buzz when I get a message. I do want to see a badge / bubble on my phone though. With iPhone / Garmin, it's all or nothing.
time to upgrade to Apple Watch ;)
it has all that granularity, which is just awesome https://support.apple.com/guide/watch/change-notification-se...
With Garmin you can enable/disable which apps notify you. Right now I only have my task app, signal and calendar sending me notifications. Nothing else gets through.
I have simple watches. They are casio.
In its own way(s), that is actually quite a smart watch.
1. push notifications (I keep my phone on silent)
2. show time, date, weather
3. change music volumes
4. remote camera trigger
5. sleep tracking / step counter
Things I like about miband:
- dirty cheap
- 2weeks+ battery
- waterproof (I just go to swim with it or take shower and had no issues)
Things I don't like in miband though:
- screen is small to read some longer push notifications (its good to get notified and figure out if something is important or not). If seems important you will still have to fish for your phone to double check
- firmware has problems with displaying emoji and some non standard characters
- bands are of poor quality and they will after half a year or so
- same with charging cable - they keep changing charging cables so you cannot use older one and those also easy to break or hard to find where you need charging
- wish had some wireless charging
- wish had some simple google maps navigation support (just basic info e.g 'in 100m turn left', etc
- wish had some physical programmable buttons to open specific apps
I agree, but also I don't want a full-size watch on my wrist, so the latest MiBand (which is larger than the one before) is actually perfect. I can see who the sender is and what the start of the message is.
>> firmware has problems with displaying emoji and some non standard characters
Haven't had this issue so far, or haven't noticed.
>> bands are of poor quality and they will after half a year or so
I also agree, but they're still so dirt cheap (bought a box of 20 different colors for like 9,99€) that I don't really care unless they break while I'm on a scooter or doing some physical activity.
>> same with charging cable - they keep changing charging cables so you cannot use older one and those also easy to break or hard to find where you need charging
Battery life is so long that I only take it off on a Sunday while showering and leave it charging near the pc for an hour or so.
>> wish had some wireless charging
Eh, the current charger is decent and used so sporadically that it's fine.
>> wish had some simple google maps navigation support (just basic info e.g 'in 100m turn left', etc
This is one of the main thing I miss from a full fledged smartwatch, but still not worth to wear the Galaxy Watch Active I have.
>> wish had some physical programmable buttons to open specific apps
I think you can do that with some Android apps like Tasker or similar.
A month ago I found out there exist metal bracelets for mibands. Bought one and probably will not have problems with bands anymore. Also they look much better.
> they keep changing charging cables so you cannot use older one
5, 6 and 7 definitely had interchangeable chargers.
A simple strap (or ring, I guess) with a minimal electronics package, waterproof, long battery life, that sends data to my phone. Anyone? Is it not a business? Everything goes upmarket.
Oh, without a mandatory monthly fee, Oura.
I’m imagining a standard-looking watch strap with a small display that would sit just below the face of whichever analog watch it was attached to. It could have a thin bridge joining the two sides of the strap together, running underneath the watch - this isn’t a problem when wearing (for example) a NATO-style strap.
I was all ready to file a provisional when I found that smart buckle or whatever they called it.
I'm surprised Apple Watch crammed so many sensors and still doesn't look half bad (I still don't like it :) )
Why can't I just buy the device? I can't manage anymore subscriptions.
All I want is a "fitness band" that will track heart rate, sleep patterns, what ever you can stuff in there and just sync it all to HealtKit next time it's in Bluetooth range of my phone. If I go for a run I want the tracking, but not the connectivity and I certainly never want to know the time.
https://nomos-glashuette.com/de
Historically (pocket) watches were highly useful, expensive and also somewhat of a status symbol. This kinda died out with quartz electronic watches, which are highly accurate and dirt cheap.
Since telling time is nowadays an ubiquitous, cheap function of everything, a wristwatch has to have a different primary function. That can be "smart" or (in particular male) "jewelry" or "status symbol" (Rolex but also apple ultra).
Just as an anecdote: A friend would often wear a very fashionable, old, mechanical watch. That watch would sometimes just stop, but that did not matter because the primary function was being jewellery on the wrist.
> an example of reliable manufacturing
A mechanical watch doesn't need any intrusion and can work for years if not decades, and if it needs a service there are a lot of qualified people who can do it, including full disassembly and assembly. From that point of view, it can be a "lifetime" device.
Any smartwatch, no matter how expensive, will reliably and predictably turn into a paperweight when it stops being supported by the manufacturer. Many smartwatches will do it sooner — when their non-replaceable battery is out of juice.
Smart watches have been around for like 10 years, so maybe in another couple decades we can expect efficiencies in power consumption and power storage. Or atleast something as revolutionary as user replaceable batteries.
However, some reviews here and there claim it does not do (satisfactorily) what it says on the tin.
- Anyone with direct experience?
There was also a ZeTime 2 announced by MyKronoz in 2019[b], but failure to launch is worrying...
[a] - https://www.mykronoz.com/eu/en/zetime.html
[b] - https://cdn-magento.mykronoz.com/media/wysiwyg/Press/press-a...
If you are interested, I'll let you have it for the cost of postage.
It has everything I need: notifications, great battery life and traditional watch looks.
Long battery life is an understatement! Even when the battery drops to near 0 the watch is still useable as a plain analog watch for at least a week giving me enough time to find where I left the damn charger (given that I don’t get to use it often at all).
What I don’t get is how this model (analog watch with just enough smarts) hasn’t gained more traction. It seems to me there’s a lot of opportunities in this space, not everything requires a high resolution display.
The oled screen simulates a classical watch, so it's not hybrid, but for me it doesn't matter that much, I barely notice.
The app could be better integrated with other fitness app, but it works with the ones I use.
Wait, Amazfit is not created by Amazon, right?
They have nothing to do with Amazon though.
... but then I bought a Garmin, sold the 3D printer, and can focus my time on other things. I loved my Pebble, but I feel like the Garmin Instinct and Fenix 7 is probably a no brainer. Just a shame that Garmin don't have Pebble's app ecosystem even though their API looks not that bad.
I don't feel the need to upgrade to a newer version. The only motivator for me to upgrade an iPhone is usually the camera. I have the cell version of the watch, but have never used it because I have my phone with me.
It is a 10 bucks with digital screen (always on) 1 month battery, sleep, step, activity and heart beat tracker. You can enable notifications but that reduces the battery life.
They are hard to find now but if you like the design, for me is the best.
It doesn't have a lot of features, but you could give it a lot of features. But don't buy one if the idea of recompling.
My smart watch can do shitloads of shit I don't need it for.
But there's no slimmed down smart watch that can do all the things I need it to do.
Imagine trying to make a smart watch that has all the features only an individual needs?
- The Forerunner 55 doesn't do SpO2 measurements.
- The 55's battery lasts me about a week, with 4-5 30 minute runs per week.
- The 55 goes on sale occasionally.
- The 55's screen could be much brighter. It's often hard to read the time and date.
Eventually the battery died and I failed miserably at replacing it so it was toast. I figured there would be something new available in the few years since I'd bought it - maybe improved battery or a fix for the "flat tire" at the bottom of the display. But when I searched, all I found were either ugly plastic "omg sportz@!" designs or classier stuff for 2-3x the price.
Still haven't purchased another smart watch. It was bad enough dropping a couple hundred bucks for ~3 years of use. I can't imagine spending $400-600 for (at best) minor incremental updates.
And than there are people who don't care about statement pieces and just want to wear whatever is most practical. And people who want to express themselves by wearing a smartwatch.
These are mostly considered to be low-status symbols. For men, in fact it is often recommended not to wear necklaces to a job interview, and hide any tattoos.
The watch basically says: I had a good job that paid well.