Hacker News Reader

Comment by insane_dreamer | Hacker News Reader

The Withings ScanWatch was the right fit for me. Unfortunately the HR sensor stopped working recently and the water resistant seal broke, and it's out of warranty, so it's in a drawer. But IMO that was the right idea: analog time, discrete notifications, ppg/ekg sensors, 2-week battery life.

View on HN

I like my Fossil watch. Similar to Withings, less health features, marginally smarter. Analog watchface in front of an eink display, 3-4 weeks battery life. Of course they got discontinued as well.

These are truly the best! And I've done a lot of research. Nowadays there are some smaller luxury brands that are closer with feature parity but not quite. The original Fossil team spun off to develop some kind of general watch platform, so I'm hopeful we'll see a remake by the time my fossil kicks out.

Mine broke down but I got it repaired by Fossil after some time for 60 Euro. Meanwhile I bought a Garmin, now the repaired Fossil sits in a drawer. Not sure what to do with it. Maybe gift it to someone, but softwarer support is probably getting worse.

I love my Withings watch but I wish I didn't have to use their app and could instead get the data directly. I tried to reverse engineer their bluetooth based protocol in the past but didn't get far because I don't have much experience with bluetooth.

I then looked at what http requests their app makes which was more straightforward and actually interesting but still not what I wanted... I hope I will find the time to try again soon.

Their app syncs with the Apple Health app (which is better), so that's what I use (and one reason why I like Withings)

I have one, I use it nearly every day, battery can last upward of a whole month. They stopped updating the original model though which is frustrating because newer models have more features, but im almost certain the hardware is virtually identical.

I would like more transparency on how long each device gets updates for, similar to how Apple handles their products.

I don't like analog watches. I wish there was a watch like the basic casio I use but smart, but not huge and rugged like a G-Shock. If pebble releases a modern version of their watch, I might finally buy a smartwatch.

I released a free watch face for the FitBit Versa (pre-Google) which emulated a Casio-style LCD. I can't remember the name, but you can get paid ones which look decent:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.azya.fitbi...

What are you looking for in a smartwatch?

Casio has smaller G-Shock smartwatches (not just the giant circular ones) that track your activity, heartrate, etc. But if you want smartphone notifications, then yeah, sadly you are out of luck.

I am totally with you overall, though. I feel that if someone were to nail it, it would be Casio.

The GBD-200 I have can receive notifications.

What I encountered with smartwatches like the Xiaomi Mi Band, is that they display notifications but their font has a tiny subset of emoji.

So when friend send a simple "thumbs up", it displays the Unicode replacement character.

How does the Casio do it?

Is it this one[0]? I saw it earlier, but I didn’t realize it could receive notifications, and the product page doesn’t mention it either.

Were you referring to that icon in the top left corner of the display that looks like it could be a notification counter? If yes, then that’s a fair point, but just being able to see the number of notifications is not the same as being able to see notifications (especially since it doesn’t seem like it would even tell you which app the notification is from, let alone what it was).

I would love to be corrected in case I am wrong, because it could be entirely possible that I am not even looking at the correct watch.

0. https://www.casio.com/us/watches/gshock/product.GBD-200-1/

Sounds like a Garmin Forerunner (255? 265?) with a custom watch face might fit the bill.

Amazfit watches.

https://www.sensorwatch.net/

I haven't made one myself because last I checked it was a hassle to ship, but this might be what you're looking for, F91-W exterior with minimally smart replacement innards.

I really like the Withings, but I've killed two of them in about a year each (shattered the face on one, failed seal leading to water ingress on the other). Meanwhile I have a draw full of older watches/smartwatches that are all in perfect working order, so this feels like build/QC problems specifically on their end.

I prefer technology that hides from view, so the Withings watches suit me as well.

The biggest downside is that the battery does not seem to be user-replaceable, so the 1 month of run-time I used to get slowly fades down to about a week or two after a couple of years of use. I can't go away for more than a week now without bringing the charger.

Mines 8 years old at this point (so old it's a Nokia branded one) and it still lasts 3-4 weeks. I wonder why it's held up better?

I agree (a ScanWatch 2 owner here) that batteries should be user-replaceable. And that the fact that it is missing from my watch is a negative thing.

However, it is a very minor thing when the battery lasts as long as it does. If it holds 80% capacity like most other batteries today at 300, or more, cycles it would take over 10 years for the battery to degrade significantly considering each cycle is up to 30 days.

The idea is nice. The implementation is a bit gaudy design-wise (subjective, granted) and flakey on the hardware side, with the HR sensor accuracy being the main issue.

I loved my scanwatch, but it lacked the feature set of any smart watch for fitness tracking. I hope daily for them to release an improved version.

Have you reached out to them? I've found their customer support even for out-of-warranty items to be fantastic.

I hadn't; I should try.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com