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Comment by ho_schi | Hacker News Reader

If you’re into sport, I recommend Garmin. It shows notifications properly. Bonus, charge it once or twice in a week. It doesn’t try to be a smartwatch.

No sport? I recommend a classy automatic wristwatch. Your movement winds it up. No charging. No apps. No updates. No battery. The spring is wind up by wearing, eight hours of wearing usually last for 24 hours. So sleeping without isn’t an issue and in worst case you can wind up manually. Best purchase of my life.

PS: Teached me also other things. Mine has an “old” acrylic glass which I considered first as drawback. It isn’t. It doesn’t break up easily like gorilla glass. And no notifications.

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Seconding the Garmin rec - though stay away from new 265/965/Epic, which have the same OLED screen and resultant "shake it all about" and then wait a blink to see the time issue as Pixels and Apple watches, and stick to Fenix/Forerunner x55 MIPS displays for weeks-long battery life with always-on display. And no need to update every 2 years.

I'm currently using a 965 and I love it. That said, I came to it from fitbit so maybe my views are warped.

Generally, just turning over my wrist to look at it works exceptionally well at showing everything, a firm tap works when that doesn't.

The 1 to 2 weeklong battery life is also great.

It's really one of my favorite watches.

My wife has the pixel watch 2 and holy cow does the battery on that thing suck. She never uses the sleep function because the damn thing is empty at the end of every day. Like 14 hours of battery life max in normal usage.

I just recommend no watch at all. Once I got a cell phone, wrist watches lost all appeal to me other than being a fancy piece of mechanical or digital jewelry and I have never seen the appeal of smart watches, despite working with technology every day. I'm sure they are useful for a subset of people, but this idea that everyone should have a smartwatch boggles my mind.

I have a smartwatch and it really helped me break my "phone addiction". I used to get a notification and check my phone in case someone needed me urgently. Then I'd just mindlessly open reddit or HN and start browsing.

Now I just glance at my wrist and ignore it most of the time. I also leave my phone lying around all over the place. I used to religiously carry it with me which made it much easier to get distracted.

Yes, people who haven't tried smartwatches don't understand this benefit. They always say "I get too many notifications, I don't want them on my wrist". But what you do is filter them so only important apps come to the watch, then you turn off notification sounds on your phone. Then you simply glance at your wrist once in a while, ignore everything unimportant, and get your phone out much less.

Or you could just filter the ones that come to your phone in the first place. I suppose android could make some improvements on the phone side to make that easier, but it's not a problem that requires involving an additional piece of technology.

No, see, it's not just the programmatic filtering, but also the filtering you do yourself. There's no filter you could make to perfectly distinguish important and unimportant texts or calls, so the final filter is you, looking at your wrist and deciding whether it's important enough to take out your phone.

Like the other guy said, when your phone buzzes and you open it up to see what it is, now you're on your phone and you can easily get distracted and spend minutes scrolling. With a watch, half the time or more you can decide it's not important enough to even touch your phone. Much easier to let it go.

I have this use case too. I use my watch's WAN capability to go out on dates with spouse sans phone. If the world ends (server goes down...) I'll know about it and meanwhile I'm fully attentive and present.

Plus you can wear clothing that doesn't accommodate a phone without needing to put it on the table.

Who comes into a thread about watches just to proclaim "I don't wear 'em"? What's even the point.

>Who comes into a thread about watches just to proclaim "I don't wear 'em"?

If you can't see that there is more nuance than that, I'm not sure how to make you understand it.

Seems like the smartwatch has become a tool for workout (and to an extent, sleep) tracking. It's the only reason I have an apple watch and don't generally use it otherwise. I can record a five hour bike ride with heart rate and not blast my iphone battery

I like working out, and the Apple Watch allows me to leave my phone at home. I also like the metrics it collects and how they're presented.

This aside, I really dislike watches and would prefer to not wear one

I've stayed away from smart watches as I don't want to be pinged all the time. (I used to wear a smart watch during the week while at work, and a classic watch on the weekends, but if I'm at work I can get the notifications on my phone or computer just fine (watch is redundant), so now I just wear my classic watch all the time.

Had a Citizen that was radio controlled, meaning that the time would update itself using a radio signal. Automatic calendar (accounts for leap years, etc.), time zones, etc. Solar powered (no battery change). Scratch-proof (no protective film needed). Had it for 10 years (unfortunately lost it) and never needed anything else.

Or a Casio f91w. Timeless.

Alarm, backlight, stopwatch, 8-10 years battery life. 20-30USD price tag. What is not to love?

> What is not to love?

Terrible UX. Cycling through the modes steps you through the settings mode. A destructive / disruptive function should never be part of the normal functional flow.

I've always thought you should need to press and hold Mode to set the time! And I thought I was the only one who was bugged by this. Timex watches got this right.

I recently got an A158W (the shiny version of an F91W) because I want to drop a Sensor Watch board into it. I'm going to make damn sure to modify this aspect of the firmware.

I get more comments on my Casio A159WGEA than the dozen other "nice" watches I own.

Mobile payment and car unlock (when I don’t have my fob) are what I use my Apple Watch for mostly. Mobile payment in particular is a game changer (no need to whip out your phone). Notifications are also important, I didn’t wear an old fashioned watch before I bought an Apple Watch.

I can also unlock my house via my watch, but again, it’s just more convenient than using a phone.

Yeah! I was going to say, google should just buy the garmin products and add a few more features. Love my garmin products. Great battery life too.

No one wants Google to come in and ruin Garmin the way they ruined fitbit.

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