The quest for a simple smartwatch

The watches were at the time considered an example of reliable manufacturing. It's sad to have this tradition fading away.

I want to see more wearable tech besides watches.

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.

I have not personally used, but looks like banglejs[0], a fully hackable watch with GPS and a good battery life (4 weeks claim) is proabably the best successor for Pebble

[0] https://banglejs.com/

I have worn a Bangle.js daily for 2 years (I have both the original and the version 2). I really like the watch, it is easy and fun to program.

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.

If you want something simple and so cheap you don't have to worry about it then I can recommend the PineTime (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.