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Giving up on smart rings

notesbylex.com

171–180 of 191 posts

Re: Giving up on smart rings

#171

None of these 3 problems have anything to do with it being a smart ring. Same problems that regular rings have, yet people still wear them. 1. Adulting: buying rings that are the right size. eg My tungsten wedding ring cannot be resized either. 2. Most people don't even lift. Those that do, dont mind taking off jewelry. I can see how this would be a problem for someone who wants to wear a smart ring for lifting. Soun…

> My tungsten wedding ring

You do realise that in the (admittedly unlikely) event that needs to be cut off in the Emergency Department, they wont have a chance?

Re: Giving up on smart rings

#172
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really the point. If you make program with a bunch of different exercises, and are modifying your program a lot, it can be a pain to keep track of what your next exercise should be. If you are automatically tracking reps, it can just announce whatever the next thing in your program is, and start rest timers automatically... It's not really about tracking reps as much as tracking where you are in a program that it…

I use the Pump Club app when lifting, it has the day's programme to follow: I simply enter the reps after each exercise. It never occurred to me that I'd want to automatically track reps. I mean, it could be kinda useful, but I'm also taking 45 to 60 seconds cool-down between exercises anyway, so it's not like it gets in the way. That also moves the app onto the next exercise in the programme. It's manual, but it's n…

I wasn't wading into the watch/ring debate, never used a ring just a watch. Was just saying while heart rate data might not be the most useful. There might be uses for other sensors and reasons to replace the ring with a watch while lifting...

Re: Giving up on smart rings

#175

None of these 3 problems have anything to do with it being a smart ring. Same problems that regular rings have, yet people still wear them. 1. Adulting: buying rings that are the right size. eg My tungsten wedding ring cannot be resized either. 2. Most people don't even lift. Those that do, dont mind taking off jewelry. I can see how this would be a problem for someone who wants to wear a smart ring for lifting. Soun…

Most people do not wear tungsten wedding rings. A wedding band can be resized and it's typical to have it resized several times during a long marriage. This is a legitimate downside of smart rings that is only shared with one niche-but-overrepresented-here option.

This is not typical

Re: Giving up on smart rings

#176
post #8

I can't bring myself to send a corporation a constant stream of extremely personal data when I know they absolutely will sell/leak all of it along with the countless assumptions they'll make about me using that same data. It'd be nice to have the information a ring or watch gathers as long as it stayed local. I haven't seen many products offering that though. The thought of not being able to continuously profit from…

Presumably you have no social media then?

Re: Giving up on smart rings

#177

All these trackers (rings, watches, wrist bands) seem so… useless. Do you really need to know your heartbeat every minute of the day? What does sleep tracking tell you, can’t you just tell if you’re tired? For athletes there are garmin type watches, which I understand during a workout. But the lifestyle trackers I don’t get the point.

I get this point of view totally, so I'll give you a different one. I pretty much wear one (cheap Fitbit) as a gentile constant reminder to do my workouts, keep active, and to increase my fitness. I also noticed that if the readiness score is very low, like single digits, I tire extremely quickly during a workout and it feels very frustrating so in that case I will give myself some extra rest. I cannot even a little tell the difference between high readiness and low readiness by the way I feel waking up or going through the day, but I also have anemia due to a genetic defect and am going through perimenopause, so not being able to tell is likely a "me" thing.

Sleep tracking isn't useful as far as trying to improve it for me, because, again, I'm in perimenopause, so my sleep is all over the place and my body just does whatever it wants. But I'm sure it is part of the readiness score or whatever.

Re: Giving up on smart rings

#178
post #27

Assuming I made this stuff. It is useless to have smart rings do the primary stuff of what a smart watch does, so not monitor your pulse or that crap because anyone who has a smart ring should have a smart watch for that and the few people who don't want smart watches but do want smart rings would be such a small outlier group I wouldn't care. The only way the concept of a smart ring makes sense to me is as a form of…

> It is useless to have smart rings do the primary stuff of what a smart watch does Not for me. I like wearing a normal watch, and I don't want to wear two watches.

That's why they make fitness tracker like FitBit Air that looks like brackets, so you aren't wearing two watches.

Re: Giving up on smart rings

#179
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is useless to have smart rings do the primary stuff of what a smart watch does Not for me. I like wearing a normal watch, and I don't want to wear two watches.

What appeals to you about a normal watch that a smart watch fails to satisfy? And what specifically do you mean by normal?

I like to look down at my wrist and see the time down to the second, and my Apple Watch S7 can't deliver on that. Either the screen doesn't light up, or it lights up after a second or so, or it lights up but it's showing me the Smart Stack or an old notification instead of the watch face. And the screen fades quickly and hides the second hand (my girlfriend's S10 shows the second hand when the screen is dimmed, so they've at least fixed that in newer models).

It also needs to be charged daily which is inconvenient, whereas a normal watch lasts for years, and the smart ring lasts several days.

The smart phone integration features don't really work well either. It'll buzz with a notification, I'll look down and there's nothing. 2-3 seconds later the notification appears, but it'll only say who it's from, not the contents, despite my privacy settings being set correctly. I tap it, and a second later the message appears. I may as well have pulled out my phone instead.

By normal, these are the criteria I've decided I want in a watch, after trying out a handful from aliexpress:

- Quartz mechanism - day-date - Arabic numerals - light face - some sort of illumination

Re: Giving up on smart rings

#180
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colmi smart rings have a reverse-engineered Bluetooth protocol, so you can use Gadgetbridge instead of the official QRing app and keep everything local.

The only problem is that the data is woefully inaccurate, so what's even the point?

I find it's comparable to the data from my Apple Watch.
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