I love my dumb watches

I was a smartwatch skeptic for a long time but finally traded my Timex out for a Garmin a little over a year ago. I paid way too much money for it but was able to get one that matched the Timex as close as reasonably possible: about the same size and weight, and the MIP display that's always on. It's one of the smaller ("S") models so the battery is fairly crap (physically smaller means way smaller battery), but unless I'm extremely active it does just fine by charging when I'm in the shower. Not charging I get about a week of normal activity (including GPS on for actual activities), maybe a bit less? It does much better if I'm not tracking anything but what's the point of that?

It's made a huge difference in my life, for the positive, and that's really surprised me. I kind of expected to hate it. It only notifies me when my phone vibrates, and I've got my phone set to be particular about notifications, so that doesn't happen often. But it does mean I miss notifications and messages way less often. I used to never notice vibration alerts if I was out walking and my phone was in my pocket. Now I can respond to people moderately quickly!

The sleep tracking is kind of worthless, but it's nice to have stats. It's mostly useful to notice longer-term trends or if something went horribly wrong (as it did last night for me), you just have it there and have something to look at, already collected.

It tells the time accurately: no more mentally compensating in my head for the drift of the watch (admittedly, my last Timex, despite being great in all other respects, was the driftiest quartz watch I've ever owned).

But the fitness tracking... the fitness tracking has genuinely been effective in actually getting me to go out and do things. I really love seeing maps of where I've been when I take a city walk, or getting run stats as I slowly level up as a runner. I don't take it particularly seriously and I think that's just about right.

I really expected to hate this thing, but instead I love it. Maybe that's because I treat it as a dumbwatch plus fitness tracker and notification bell for my phone? The idea of having games, much less a web browser, on it really does sound ghastly.

I don’t understand how you can say a smart watch isn’t, on top of all the smart features, also the best watch there is when it comes to keeping time. It keeps perfect time, always, even over DST changes, even when you change time zones. You never even have to set them!

Also your Apple Watch is defective if you have to charge it all night. I’m up to my third, I always wear it while I sleep, I only charge it when I’m getting ready for bed or getting ready in the morning, and the battery never runs out.

Any meeting? I wouldn’t want to be the guy that is always 5 minutes late

The heart-rate monitoring on my Garmin gives highly accurate tracking of calories burned, better than anything I could do by hand. Very valuable, I was able to lose 50 pounds and I was able to do minimal calorie counting. Basically I ate a very consistent weekly diet and used the watch to tell me if I had done enough exercise that I could eat something else. It's still very useful, I look at my calorie count regularly to guide how much extra to eat before and after activities.

I've also found some of the other ML-powered derived metrics surprisingly useful. There's a "training status" that has "productive/maintaining/strained/recovery/detraining." When I've got a bad cold/flu/covid type illness it often says "strained" which I can feel in my body but it's nice to have that objective external metric of "yes, your body is not working right and you should take it easy."

Similarly when I am working out it's nice to be able to look at my heart rate at a glance and know if I am over/under exerting myself.

Good recommendation, also shout out the Casio Lineage. (solar, atomic, sapphire crystal, titanium case/band). I got mine sub-$200. This one: https://www.casio.com/europe/watches/casio/product.LCW-M100T...