Watchy: Hackable $50 Smartwatch

About the Pebble -- I am definitely a fan, and haven't yet seen another smartwatch with its particular appeal. After playing around with a lot of watchfaces I ended up almost always sticking with an analog face which I'm finding helps me visualize the passage of time a lot better than a digital readout.

It is interesting, given the amount of environmental concerns people have over cow flatulates, plastic bags, straws, etc... that nobody seems concerned about these obviously short-lifetime hunks of non-biodegradable/non-recyclable plastics, rubber, silicone, rare earth metals, and worse.

All the environmentalists that scream at others for putting a can in the wrong bin, yet buy a new Apple Watch every release cycle...

Bah, a real curmudgeon would have said a £10 Casio quartz :-)

I flick back and forth on this. The features i actually use on my Apple Watch:

    1. it extends phone battery life[1]
    2. I'm UK based but i work with colleagues across APAC & NA - in 3 of the corners of the "infograph" watch face i have NYC, Mumbai & HK times, it shows the city, the 24hr time & handily the offset - i use this all the time because outlook is poor for this simple use case
    3. The 4th corner has a timer - i use it for everything from "the dog's out the back garden, i should remember to let her back in, in 5 mins" to brewing a cuppa to reminding me to do something - the UI here is really good, i'm a mixture of "hey siri, set a timer for 25 minutes" vs. just tapping one of the pre-set timers
    4. Up next calendar entry - coupled with calendar notifications, the only notifications i still use today
    5. Day date complication
    6. Temperature - but it's not the current temp i find useful, it's the daily range display - every night "can i let the cat stay out overnight or will it get too cold?"
    7. it's super convenient for driving directions in a rental car when abroad, not so much in my own car though
    8. Music / audiobook / podcast volume & skipping
    9. The vo2 max readout has caused me to change exercise habits and the HRV thing has caused me to pay more attention to my sleep schedule - he says at 11:26pm
   10. But my favourite is Apple Pay, personal account, joint account, corporate card & flight tickets back when we used to do that, super handy

    1. Every other thing on there - from sleep trackers to camera viewfinder remote view thingy (cool, but useless)

[1] in 2017 when i got my 2nd gen apple watch, my iPhone 7 would be almost dead when i got home from work. When i started using the apple watch, my phone battery would have ~20% left when i got home. I was no longer wakening the phone screen to deal with notifications or fiddling with podcast / music controls. Shortly after that i disabled all notifications but that's another story.